This Ice Cream Float Conjures Cel-Ray Soda

Smithereens, a New England restaurant that opened this month, even delivers a swig of the ocean at dessert.

Instead of serving a traditional ice cream float in an old-fashioned glass, the East Village restaurant has a celery ice cream presented like the foaming bubbles created by an algae-filled wave cresting on a supple rock, or in this case, as it pools in a sandy-colored ceramic bowl.

It’s not the first vegetal dessert from chef Nick Tamburo. He floated takes on other root vegetables like parsnips at pop-ups through the years before he landed on one with celery for the Smithereens opening menu he debuted with sommelier Nikita Malhotra at the top of November.

This dessert is one of those dishes, like several others at Smithereens — aside from the more straightforward lobster roll — that is genuinely surprising. Try as you might to imagine what it will be like when it hits the table, you can’t. It’s not the only oceanic sweet on the menu, either: the restaurant also serves a candied seaweed layered dessert.

To make the celery float, celery root ice cream is placed in the bowl, with a drizzle of coffee oil. Cherries (marinated in red wine vinegar and shio koji), sit in the center like a cove — no lurid maraschinos here. Finally, it gets spritzed with homemade soda made with carbonated fresh celery juice seasoned with citrus and sugar. It’s simple and delicate, and the green coloring is faint, at least under the dim lighting of the submersible of a dining room. The effervescent dessert is somewhere between a vegetal Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Soda and syrupy espresso Manhattan Special, two cult-favorite New York-based soda brands that — like this Smithereens dessert — are an acquired taste.

Tamburo used to work at Claud; he left by the time Penny opened, but as it turns out, the team’s upstairs seafood bar serves Cel-Ray, one of the few fancier places to offer the New York delicatessen essential.

The ideal way to order the celery float at Smithereens is with one of their homemade apple cider doughnuts, which arrive with halos of steam. Rip it and dip it into the ice cream, as you should with their anadama bread and their clam chowder take during the savory portion of the meal.