The Old-School Brooklyn Drink That’s Creamy, Foamy, and Perfect for Summer

Why It Works

A cocktail shaker aerates the milk to create the proper foamy head.
A single ice cube keeps the drink cold and helps agitate the milk for better aeration without over-diluting it.
Fox’s U-Bet brand chocolate syrup gives the drink its signature chocolate-acid flavor. If you know, you know.

I’m a Brooklyn original. I grew up in the borough back when kids still played stickball in the street and most folks from elsewhere were too afraid to hop on the subway and visit. I did a lot of meeting friends in Manhattan back then. But those people missed out on another Brooklyn original: the egg cream.

For much of my youth, I lived around the corner from Tom’s Restaurant (typically called Tom’s Diner) on Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights. Tom’s is a Brooklyn institution that opened in 1936, when the Dodgers were still playing at Ebbets Field just a handful of blocks away. Tom’s is a diner, but it’s also a soda fountain, and dates from a time when soda fountains were common. While they always touted their cherry lime rickey as their signature drink, my breakfast order always included a chocolate egg cream, another soda-fountain classic, delivered by the late owner, Gus Vlahavas, who would, without fail, ask me how the rest of my family was doing.

An egg cream is a difficult thing to describe to the uninitiated. It’s hard to make a mixture of milk, seltzer, and chocolate syrup sound good—and that’s after you’ve cleared up the fact that there is no egg involved at all. (There are lots of theories about how it got its name, including cutesy ones about it being a corruption of Yiddish, but most likely the answer lies in older related drinks that did include egg.)

But one sip and it’s easy to understand: The egg cream is one part rich, two parts refreshing—all cold and lightly fizzy—and has a signature chocolate flavor that squeals with the faintly electric, metallic tang of the very specific brand of chocolate syrup: Fox’s U-Bet.

A proper Brooklyn egg cream, as made at the Brooklyn Farmacy & Soda Fountain, a new-school take on an old-school soda fountain.

Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez

I’ve never had an egg cream that tasted right when made with other common chocolate syrups, such as Hershey’s. What exactly makes U-Bet taste the way it does, I can’t confidently say. Maybe it’s one of the flavorings, or maybe it’s the potassium sorbate added as a preservative. Or maybe I just dreamt it, a false sense memory accumulated over so many formative years. I think it’s real, though, and I’d argue it’s important.

Here’s the thing: A chocolate egg cream is a very, very simple beverage, but it’s weirdly difficult to make just right. The reason comes down to how it was traditionally made in soda fountains of old. There, the soda jerk would pour milk into a tall glass, then shoot a concentrated jet of highly pressurized seltzer into it, creating a violent collision that would froth and aerate the milk. This would form the drink’s signature white foam cap.

Then, the jerk would drizzle in the chocolate syrup in a thin stream, cutting a small hole through the white foam cap without damaging it, and quickly spin a spoon underneath that upper foam–cloud layer to blend the chocolate with the fizzy milk below. The result is a drink with a visible divide between the pure white foam cap and the lightly chocolaty drink below.

Doing that at home is difficult. Pouring seltzer from a can or bottle won’t create the pressurized fizz necessary to froth the milk, and my attempts with CO2-charged water from an iSi siphon were disappointing—it’s challenging to get that water sufficiently carbonated, no matter how long it sits in the fridge to chill and dissolve CO2.

The Egg Cream Soda Solution

The cocktail shaker method can actually make too much foam! This was my first attempt with it, after this I just shook less (and you can also just not put all the foam in the glass).

Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez

The solution for a proper egg cream at home lies in another method of aerating drinks: a cocktail shaker. It works like this:

Add a single ice cube to the shaker, which helps keep the liquids cold and helps agitate the milk during shaking, for better aeration and foaming.
Pour in the milk and a small amount of seltzer and shake vigorously. The seltzer will go flat from the shaking, but it introduces gas to helps the milk foam.
Then remove the ice cube, pour the foamed milk into your glass, top up with the rest of the seltzer (the real source of carbonation), and mix in the chocolate syrup.

The method works great—almost too well. Sometimes I got so much foam I didn’t have room for the full drink below it. (The solution to that is simple: shake a little less and/or skip pouring all the foam into the glass.)

This is a proper Brooklyn egg cream from a Brooklynite who claims the right to call it that—made at home without a soda gun or a vintage glass seltzer siphon.