NYC’s top restaurants dishing out fancy soft-serve ice cream as a cost-cutting dessert option

To fight the sweltering heat of an East Coast summer — sweat sizzling on scorching pavement, commuters silently begging for a breeze on humidity-clogged train platforms — there’s nothing better than a cone of soft serve ice cream.

Once the province of neighborhood kids waving dollar bills at ice cream trucks — and more recently, given a flavor upgrade in an array of trendy Manhattan shops — the increasingly less humble treat now finds itself elevated to the status of the coolest staple on NYC’s high-end dessert menus, serving up sticky-fingered nostalgia for adult palates.

“There’s not many people that don’t like ice cream, right?” Brooklyn native Ayesha Nurdjaja, executive chef and partner at Shukette, told The Post.

But at the trendy Middle Eastern eatery, which celebrates its third anniversary in July, the $12 tower of tahini-flavored ice cream topped with halva floss, pomegranate and hazelnuts, known as The Mic Drop, is more than just a trend — it’s boosting the bottom line.

With even the most popular eateries having to work harder to stay financially viable in an era of rampant inflation, the quick and delicious fix of putting soft serve on a dessert menu — or even scrapping the rest of the menu entirely — has almost become the new normal.

“I think having pastry departments is not as lucrative as it used to be in restaurants,” Nurdjaja said.