Why Ice Cream and Wine Make the Perfect Pairing

A Glass and une Glace

In 2020, when the chefs Robert Compagnon, 39, and Jessica Yang, 39, opened Folderol, their ice cream parlor and natural wine bar in Paris’s 11th Arrondissement, they hoped that wine would counter the seasonal nature of a scoop shop while ice cream would set their wine bar apart in a district that had “like 36 of them serving similar bottles within a 10-meter radius,” says Compagnon. To the couple’s surprise, however, the pairing of alcohol with sweets — as opposed to typically salty bar snacks — proved so popular that they had to hire a bouncer to control the crowds. Now similar concepts are taking off globally: In Mexico City’s Condesa neighborhood, four friends recently opened Club Sorbet, an outdoor cafe with a menu of French pastries, ice cream and wine. Its co-founder Tony Montaño, 33, says the goal was to provide “something for everyone — adults, kids, those in a couple or alone.” In London’s Islington, the restaurateurs Alex Young, 36, and George de Vos, 35, debuted their ice cream and wine bar, the Dreamery, in December 2024 and have been contending with constant lines ever since. “We thought people might stop in after their meal, but it turns out people want ice cream and wine all day,” says Young. While de Vos and Young serve a rotating list of unexpected flavors like chocolate olive oil, brown butter raisin and bittersweet orange alongside bottles of biodynamic pinot noir and bubbly pét-nat, Soonchan Kwon, 31, is offering even more daring options at her wine bar, Waa, in Seoul’s Seongdong-gu area, including corn and blue cheese. Wine and ice cream, says Young, are “just two very joyful things, and the joy is compounded when they’re together.”

— Lauren Joseph

Containers That Will Keep Your Secrets

Rubber Furniture Bounces Back

Humans have been manufacturing rubber for thousands of years, first from the milky white resin of rubber trees native to the tropical Americas and then, starting in the early 20th century, from petroleum byproducts. But despite how common the material is, “we don’t use it as prevalently in the design world,” says the sculptor and furniture maker Richard Aybar, 41. “I wanted to get to the bottom of why.” Aybar, who worked in the New York fashion industry for a decade before relocating to Berlin in 2018, made his first rubber piece, a translucent stool, in 2019 in collaboration with a Los Angeles special effects studio. “I liked the haptic experience of encountering rubber,” he says. “It felt perverse.” He launched his first full collection — a series of chunky chairs and benches in variegated shades of amber, and a fountain ringed with disembodied, water-spouting breasts — at the Design Miami fair in December of that year. “The conversation was always a little bit sotto voce, ‘Oh, it looks sexual,’” recalls Aybar. And so, for his latest collection, which will be on view at Tiwa Gallery in TriBeCa through Oct. 8, he made the kink even more blatant with a stool featuring a round opening in the middle of the seat. When people interact with his objects for the first time, “their eyes glaze over, and immediately they’re like, ‘I want to bite it,’” he says. “The fact that you can be in touch with that sense of desire, that you can be honest with yourself and with me about it,” Aybar adds, “I want to keep pushing that button.”

— Michael Snyder

Claws Are Out on Dinner Plates

When the chef Brandon Jew, 46, was growing up, his father would always insist on a double order of chicken feet at dim sum parlors. “It’s a flex for Chinese diners to be able to eat a chicken foot well,” Jew says. Today, at his San Francisco restaurant Mister Jiu’s, serving foot-on poultry — including crispy-skinned squab and Bresse chicken simmered with ginger and scallion in a pig bladder — offers a different kind of bragging right. It signals that the bird is of the highest quality since, generally, only small specialty producers offer fully intact legs. Jew insists, however, that showing off isn’t his only motivation. “Where the joint connects the drumstick to the foot, there’s some fun little chicken tendon I like getting my teeth into,” he says. Now more and more chefs are discovering that pleasure. Last summer, at his San Francisco restaurant Quince, the chef-owner Michael Tusk, 60, offered squab cooked on a hearth with Jimmy Nardello peppers, gooseberries and komatsuna (Japanese mustard spinach), plating each serving of sliced meat with a single foot-on leg as well as the bird’s heart, speared by a sprig of lavender.

And at Crown Shy in New York, the foot-on leg of the habanero-and-citrus grilled chicken emerges from under a flurry of Little Gem lettuce. When the chef-owner James Kent, who died in June 2024, envisioned the dish, “he wanted you to pick it up, get in there and eat it,” says the restaurant’s R&D chef, Justin Osorio, 35. “Toward the end of the foot, it’s got a lot of nice juicy meat.” At Angler in San Francisco, the talons are pedicured — “gotta trim the nails,” says the chef Joe Hou, 38 — and left attached to the wood-oven-roasted chicken, in part because “we want people to understand chicken is chicken.” According to the Hong Kong-based chef Palash Mitra, 45, there’s also a practical side to the trend. Leaving the feet on the tandoori pigeon at New Punjab Club, where he serves as culinary director, encourages even cooking (a challenge with tiny birds). The collagen in the claws, he says, gives “amazing sheen” to the stuffed chicken leg with curry at Prince and the Peacock, another restaurant he oversees. The foot is also “very eye-catching in a morbid way,” he adds. “The toes are curled in an act of defiance.”

— Martha Cheng

A Bauhaus-Inspired Daybed

Among the design-conscious, the word “daybed” has long conjured the tufted slab of black leather introduced by the Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as a companion to the famed chair he conceived for the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion in Spain. Revered for its minimalist form, the chaise nonetheless falls a bit short when it comes to function: Few admirers would likely choose its stiff expanse for a cozy afternoon nap. The same cannot be said of the daybed recently created for Minotti by the 46-year-old Italian designer Giampiero Tagliaferri. Taking inspiration from the Bauhaus original, Tagliaferri, formerly the creative director of the Los Angeles eyewear brand Oliver Peoples, also employs leather, chrome, clever tufting and a headrest. But with rounded proportions that evoke late nights at Halston’s townhouse, this voluptuous version invites instant repose. Minotti Libra daybed, minotti.com.

— Nancy Hass

Photo assistant: Martina Giammaria

A Romantic Spin on the ‘Toi et Moi’ Ring

Historians agree that the relationship between Napoleon Bonaparte and Marie-Josèphe Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie, later known as Empress Josephine, was volcanic. The 26-year-old general proposed to the 32-year-old aristocratic widow (her first husband, Alexandre de Beauharnais, died by the guillotine) just a few months after being introduced. The style of her engagement ring — a one-carat pear-shaped diamond nestled beside a pear-cut sapphire of equal size — became known as toi et moi, symbolizing passionate equality. Now, Lugano, a jewelry house founded in Southern California in 2005, has created a modern homage to such romantic equipoise with a ring crafted of violet titanium and white gold, featuring a 1.5-carat drop-shaped white diamond and a two-carat pinkish-purple diamond, one of only a few such gems in the world. Lugano toi et moi ring, luganodiamonds.com.

— N.H.

Photo assistant: Tim Lopez. Set designer’s assistant: Uma Tufekcic