Frozen yogurt comes in swirls, obviously, but it comes in waves, too, following the crests and crashes of the trend cycle, each fro-yo reflective of its era. The concept hit critical mass in the fitness-freak nineteen-eighties, but by the late two-thousands chains such as Pinkberry and Red Mango had inspired a craze for giant tubs of the stuff buried under sugary mountains of candy toppings. In the twenty-tens, fro-yo seemed briefly eclipsed, in New York, at least, by a mania for ice cream—your Ample Hills, your Morgenstern’s, your Caffè Panna. But now frozen yogurt is indisputably back. Have you seen the lines out the door? Even Van Leeuwen, a trailblazer of the fancy-ice-cream movement, has put it on tap. The style currently consuming New York is more elegant, more restrained than the fro-yos of yore; these are sophisticated yogurts, minimalist yet indulgent, a gastronomic version of old-money European vacations, or of our never-ending fascination with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy—thin, tasteful, never trying too hard. Still, the one thing every fro-yo wave has in common is a sheen of virtue: frozen yogurt, with its not-too-sweetness and lactic tang and ambient implication of protein, can plausibly be branded as a health food, even if we all know it isn’t much of one.

This time around, the Upper East Side is the epicenter of the fro-yo explosion—draw from this whatever demographic inferences you will. Butterfield Market, the fancy-schmancy grocery store that’s recently been attracting crowds for its viral “dot cakes,” has been serving frozen yogurt for what feels like forever, but its version is not especially notable. Compared with the wonders of the grocery aisles, the topping options are fairly generic (sprinkles, chopped-up berries), and the yogurt is so mild that you’ll just have to take it on faith that it isn’t ice cream. Fro-yo heads will tell you, conspiratorially, that Butterfield Market is rumored to have the same supplier as Forty Carrots, the café tucked away on the seventh floor of Bloomingdale’s which claims to have introduced frozen yogurt to New York City some fifty years ago. They do taste awfully similar, generically sweet and cold, rather than funky and tart, as I like my frozen yogurt.

You’ll do far better if you walk to Eighty-eighth and Madison and dip into the small, cool Madison Fare, a specialty-foods-and-candy storefront opened, in 2022, by the chef Amin Kinana, whose frozen-yogurt creations are, by my estimation, unreserved works of art. The yogurt itself is dense and almost puckeringly sour, and oh, my God, the toppings. They’re some of the most spectacular toppings I’ve ever encountered, an array of ritzy, globe-spanning garnishes that evoke the posh worldliness of peak-era Dean & DeLuca: snowy cubes of Turkish delight, cinnamon-dusted pecans, bitter cocoa nibs, pistachio knafeh, vibrant edible flowers, honey on the comb, actual honest-to-goodness raspberry coulis. At many of the ultra-trendy fro-yo spots I’ve visited lately, the sundaes seem more optimized for photography than for consumption. Many of these magnificent-looking concoctions fail the most fundamental test of a summery treat: do I want to eat every single bite, and maybe even go back for more? Mimi’s in Nolita, which, of all my stops, draws the longest and most youthful lines, is the apotheosis of the problem: pretty, and pricey, and utterly fine. Interview magazine recently built a portfolio around the actor Alia Shawkat tasting the city’s most viral frozen yogurts; of a Mimi’s specimen, she declared, correctly, that it was good but “not that good.” The line you’re waiting in at Mimi’s is, essentially, a line for content. At Madison Fare, by contrast, the toppings maximalism lands you somewhere genuinely delicious, and often surprising.

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Madison Fare recently branched out to the Village, opening a dedicated yogurt shop on the same picturesque block of West Eighth Street as Culture, a standard-bearer for yogurt—they make theirs in-house, and it’s available both frozen and fresh. Culture’s toppings don’t hold a candle to Madison Fare’s, but Culture may have the best actual yogurt in the city: ultra-tangy, ultra-rich, in an ever-changing roster of flavors. The fruity selections are terrific—whenever they have blood orange on the menu, I’m awfully tempted—but, somewhat puritanically, I always find myself drawn to the plain. The only fro-yo shop that can compete with Culture for sheer yogurtful yogurtiness is Go Greek, in NoHo, where you can practically taste the probiotics doing the fandango, though the shop’s overt focus on macros and wellness robs the experience of a fair portion of its little-treat joy, and the notably health-conscious selection of toppings skews the flavor profile of a sundae disappointingly toward breakfast parfait. Compared with the fro-yo at Culture and Go Greek, the yogurt at Birdie’s, a cute little spot in the West Village, is so un-yogurtlike that there’s hardly any pleasure in the plain. I’d recommend ordering the coffee or peanut-butter yogurt, dousing it in Biscoff butter and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and telling yourself it’s Mister Softee.

One of my cherished summer rituals is to wander from my Brooklyn apartment over to Culture’s original location, in Park Slope, though lately I’ve been rerouting to Sofreh Café—the casual all-day offshoot of the chef Nasim Alikhani’s magnificent Persian restaurant Sofreh, near Barclays Center—which has installed a two-flavor soft-serve machine. One flavor rotates monthly. (On my most recent visit, it was sour cherry, Barbie-pink and fruity.) The other is always saffron-rosewater, which is sunshine-yellow, heady as a summer garden, and lusciously silken in texture. Sometimes it’s served with a gentle sprinkle of crushed pistachios, sometimes not. Either way, it might be my favorite of the dozens of frozen yogurts I’ve tried. There’s no line for now, but give it time. ♦