Tyra Banks’s Hot Ice Cream Is Real, and I Tried It

For the last five years, Tyra Banks has been trying to become the glam Willy Wonka of frozen treats, and her attempts to build her ice-cream empire have come in fits and starts. She launched her first brand, Smize Cream, in 2020, which has had brief pop-up runs in places like L.A., Dubai, and Princess Cruise ships. In 2024, Kamala Harris took her nieces to the now-renamed SMiZE & DREAM pop-up in Washington, D.C., cementing it as a very serious site of national diplomacy. In June of this year, Banks took it international, opening her scoop shop’s first-ever permanent location in Sydney, Australia. There, in September, she launched her stickiest idea yet: hot ice cream. She’s also been promoting it with increasingly crazed social posts. “I feel like I’m going crazy!” she says at the start of one video; another begins with her saying, “I’m scared, I’m excited, I’m nervous,” with wide eyes. Every quote Banks drops about her hot ice cream makes it less comprehensible than before. In late October, for example, she told the New York Times that she was “trying to make sure that the consistency wasn’t familiar in the mouth.”

Celebrities launch food all the time; just this year, we’ve seen protein-laced popcorn from Khloé Kardashian and $38 pickles from Pamela Anderson. But Banks is approaching this hot ice cream like it’s her life’s passion, like she’s a food scientist, and like she’s a food-performance artist all in one. She has crafted elaborate, Tolkien-esque lore for her hot ice cream by pitting it in a battle against her cold ice cream, which is represented by her new alter ego, “Santa SMiZE,” Santa’s sworn enemy from the South Pole. She wrote a tie-in Christmas song called “Santa SMiZE, Santa SMiZE” and performed it in character as her alter ego to the bafflement of a bar full of gay Australian guys on December 8. A video from the performance with the caption “somebody come collect tyra banks” went viral. Banks posted a TikTok the next day with a response: “That wasn’t Tyra, that was Santa SMiZe … she hates me. She hates that I’ve invented hot ice cream.” She also revealed her plans to “bring my hot ice cream to New York,” which led me to the Meatpacking District on a chilly Wednesday to experience the foreign mouthfeel of hot ice cream for myself.

But all was not well when I arrived at the hot ice-cream launch venue. Banks was hosting this momentous occasion in a space called ARTECHOUSE, which is one of those places where the walls are all screens, like the Sphere but nonspherical. Projected on the walls, floors, and ceiling were graphics that looked like a special holiday edition of Candy Crush: kaleidoscopic tinsel and nutcrackers swirling on a 15-minute loop. On the venue’s upper level, signs were posted on a bar that teased the new flavor of hot ice cream for journalists to sample: “Santa SMiZE Cookies.” But there were no signs of Tyra, hot ice cream, or cookies, or even the aroma of cookies anywhere. Instead, people were rushing in and out of a room behind the bar, looking sort of worried. A hot-ice-cream churning device — identifiable from TikToks of the Sydney scoop shop — had been removed from the counter behind the bar and replaced with a hot plate, a stockpot, and a guy continuously stirring with a ladle. Surely, this was not how they did it in Sydney in Tyra’s own flavor labs.

After about 20 minutes, I saw members of the event’s staff rush in with a grocery delivery, which included a whipped-cream charger and Sysco-brand whipped “topping.” Soon after, a publicist for the event approached my group to apologize for the delay. “We’re having a problem with the hot ice cream,” she said, with all the gravity of a character on The Bear. Tyra had still not arrived; we heard whispers that she was coming to the event straight from her flight from Sydney. It was 6 p.m., and the traffic was getting bad.

An hour into the event, the hot ice cream was ready for consumption: a chocolate goop doled out in sample cups and topped with soft cookie crumble and chocolate whipped cream. It was served with little wooden tasting spoons, which differed from the presentation I had seen on social media. At SMiZE & DREAM, one is meant to sip one’s hot ice cream through a straw, which had given me the impression that the texture would be akin to a warm milkshake. But this product looked closer to a thin pudding. Gripping it in my hands, I was pleased with its temperature; it was less hot than a hot beverage but radiated the warmth of a freshly baked cookie. I ditched my spoon and went straight for the sip. While it wasn’t very thick, it did have a sort of fatty unctuousness that gave it a richer mouthfeel (and throat after-feel) than a typical hot beverage. If I were feeling ungenerous, I would call the effect almost oily. I didn’t question the quality of the chocolate, but I overheard someone compare the flavor to Swiss Miss. Ultimately, Santa SMiZE Cookies is how I imagine it would taste and feel to melt a scoop of ice cream and heat it up again over the stove, and I now know this is something some people do, but that I would not want to do. Ahead of the event, Banks told People that her hot ice cream will soon roll out throughout New York, first at “the fancy Michelins,” and after downing two hot ice creams, I can say that it is not worth tracking this down at Michelin prices.

Ten minutes before the event was set to end, Banks’s canary-yellow Santa SMiZE graphics filled the screens on the walls, and a DJ started looping her Christmas track. Then Banks walked in, descended the ARTECHOUSE stairs, and delivered a six-minute speech detailing the “deeper story” of why she invented hot ice cream. Banks said she wants mom-and-pop ice-cream shops to steal her concept so that they can stay in business during winter, “because I saw a serious issue on a global level of the ice-cream industry being seasonal.” She added that she’s seen shops “lose their business because of seasons.” Banks having beef with the concept of seasons is not a celebrity feud I could have ever predicted, but that’s why Tyra has endured as long as she has: She keeps you guessing. She also addressed the viral videos of her “Santa SMiZE” performance at that Sydney gay bar, noting that it was all part of her master plan. “People were like, ‘Tyra has lost her mind.’ And finally, we presented the world with this video to show: Tyra is crazy, but she ain’t insane.” I would say the evidence, after a night of hot ice cream and “Santa SMiZE,” was inconclusive.

I walked out into the night and noted, happily, that Tyra Banks’s hot ice cream was making my stomach feel neither crazy nor insane. I learned very little about where hot ice cream will actually be made available after this press tasting, but it sounds like if Banks has her way, it will be widely adopted by struggling mom-and-pop Michelin-starred restaurants across the city. Weirder things have happened. Reindeer can fly, and ice cream can be hot.