So for starters, it’s pronounced mee-shay or mee-shoo-ay. It’s a combination of honey (mi) and snow (xue) in Mandarin, which all makes sense for the viral ice cream shop out of China.

Mixue Ice Cream & Tea, the world’s largest fast-food chain by store locations — more than 46,000 worldwide, has opened at 266 Canal at the end of Cortlandt Alley. They offer just two things: soft-serve ice cream and a variety of iced sweet teas. Not exactly the season for any of it, but you would never know from the throngs of puffer-clad teens. (My pals and I were the age outliers by about four decades.)

Here’s the hook: a cone of white ice cream (it truly does not list a flavor) is $1.19. The matcha flavor is totally worth the extra 50 cents — it comes in at $1.69. A lemonade is $1.99; the strawberry jasmine tea is $4.99. (It was freezing, so I leave the tea tasting to someone else.)

The company was founded in 1997 in Zhengzhou by Zhang Hongchao, who, according to Fortune, was studying at Henan University of Economics and Law when he opened a shaved‑ice stall in Zhengzhou using a 3,000‑yuan loan from his grandmother. In 1999 he opened a second stand called Mixue Bingcheng. But several stalls after that failed, until he opened Mixue Ice Cream & Tea in 2003, Wikipedia said, and “around 2005 the company introduced soft serve ice cream at the price of just 1 yuan, which quickly became a best-seller and its first signature product. By 2023, Mixue had sold approximately 442 million ice cream cones in China.”

The company is public as of this past March, and franchised, though the parent company supplies ingredients, equipment and packaging to franchisees. The smiling — and sometimes scowling — snow man is the “Snow King.”

The first store outside of China was opened in 2018 in Hanoi, Vietnam.