Please note, Four Winters has now closed. Time Out Food editors, April 2019.
Four Winters is an ice cream parlour with a rather unusual secret ingredient: liquid nitrogen. They’ve patented a special machine that freezes ice cream to order with a blast of the gas. Don’t panic. It all sounds nuttier than it actually is at this, Four Winters’ small, bright Soho branch. Yes, it’s a bit weird watching your ice cream billow clouds of gas as it’s frozen in that patented machine – but said contraption looks a bit like a standard Magimix, really, and the staff doing the freezing are wearing hairnets. There’s nothing less glamorous and more stoically familiar than a hairnet.
But what does nitrogen-laced ice cream taste like? Pretty much like normal ice cream, if a tad smoother. Four Winters do a changing ‘seasonal’ offering as well as year-round specials, and the best flavour I tried was a tart, zingy passionfruit on the spring menu. Also excellent was a rich and nutty peanut ‘butter cup’ shake.
The only disappointment was a rather cheap-tasting chocolate ice cream, which was too much like something you might hoover up at a kid’s birthday party and then deeply regret. Everything else was good though, and you’ve got to love the novelty nitrogen. And the hairnets.