Yes, those are free. Next Tuesday is a national food holiday, and one Upper East Side institution is marking it by handing out 1,000 of them across its two neighborhood shops. There’s a catch for anyone planning to stroll over whenever, though. The whole thing runs in timed waves, and once a wave runs dry, that’s it until the next one.
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Butterfield Market is teaming up with Tate’s Bake Shop on Tuesday, August 4 to hand out 1,000 free small cups of frozen yogurt, each one topped with a Tate’s chocolate chip cookie. That date is National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, and the froyo will be available at both Butterfield locations: 1114 Lexington Avenue, between 77th and 78th streets, and 1150 Madison Avenue, on the corner of 85th Street.The cups are going out in two rounds rather than all at once. The first wave starts at 11 a.m. and the second follows at 5 p.m., both while supplies last. With no guarantee the second round holds up once word gets around, the safer play is showing up close to the top of either hour.
Early arrivals get a little extra. The first 25 people at each location will also walk away with free merch.
Frozen yogurt isn’t a random pairing here. Butterfield has kept a froyo station going for years, and when the Madison Avenue store opened in the former Dean & DeLuca space in 2020, its 85th Street express window was originally meant to serve froyo before it broadened out to other food and drinks. The Lexington Avenue shop is the original, a grocery that traces its roots to 1915 and has stayed in the same family for three generations.
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Tate’s brings a Long Island backstory of its own. Kathleen King started selling cookies at her family’s Southampton farm stand at age 11, relaunched under the Tate’s name in 2000 after losing control of her earlier bakery, and sold the company to Mondelez in 2018 in a deal valued at $500 million. The thin, crispy chocolate chip cookie stayed the signature through all of it.With 1,000 cups split between two stores and two time slots, the math works out to a few hundred per window. It won’t take long.
