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We are berry upset.
For the uninitiated, a trip to BerryLine isn’t like your childhood pit stop at Dairy Queen. Mysteriously, over the past few months, the frozen yogurt shop has become Cambridge’s hardest club to get into. Some have postulated that the line is so long it may be visible from space, but those claims could not be verified by The Crimson.
The sudden ballooning of the queue has caused many to scratch their heads and wonder: what changed? With so many queries, we knew we could not rest without giving our dear readers the scoop on what’s made BerryLine so popular. The journalistic stakes have never been higher.
At The Crimson, we ask the tough questions: How will Harvard adjust to drastic funding cuts? How will President Alan M. Garber ’76 secure the future for one of the world’s most revered academic institutions? And what frozen yogurt flavor did you get?
Naturally, we decided to send our finest reporters on the ground to ask these difficult questions and get to the cold, hard truth of why that line is so damn long.
Cozily tucked between Faro Cafe and Zinneken’s on the corner of Mass. Ave. and Arrow Street, the shop itself has enough seating space for about seven people inside and six people on their patio. Eccentric illustrations — a purple-and-green mustached angel cupcake, for example — adorn the outside walls, keeping the waiting patrons company.
BerryLine has served a variety of seasonal frozen yogurt and ice cream flavors alongside creative, homemade toppings since it was founded in 2007 by Pok “Eric” K. Yang and Matthew Wallace when they were postdoctoral fellows at Harvard and MIT, respectively. One wonders if they plan to use their decades of combined schooling to confront the size of the line.
On one of our visits to the fro-yo establishment, we found about 25 people shivering outside on a cold fall night waiting for their cold treats to make them even colder.
Yael A. Danon ’28, a regular at BerryLine who had been standing in line for 16 minutes and had only made it to the middle, justified the wait. “It feels cozy,” said Danon. When asked how much we could pay to steal her spot in line, she responded assuredly: “You couldn’t.” Lincoln Chen, a second-year student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, requested “100 bucks” (see Figure 1). Venmo or Zelle, Lincoln?
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For many, the line offers an important space to socialize — just ask the many dates that we interrupted. The best way to enjoy Harvard’s favorite frozen yogurt spot (though it’s still only listed as third-best on TripAdvisor) is certainly with friends and family. Cousins Chloe and Natasha Tan were invited to enjoy BerryLine by friends who attend Harvard. By luck, they only waited five minutes before securing their treasured Arrow Street treats. Upon further questioning, however, they admitted to cheating the system by cutting the line. Not cool, Chloe and Natasha, not cool at all.
Over the course of our investigation, we ran into Jeremy Harris-Walker, an employee at Beyond Full, a new restaurant down the street. We caught Jeremy holding a large metal tray stacked high with deep-fried Oreos. Jeremy was trying to hand the sweet-treats out to unassuming BerryLine patrons trapped in the queue with the hope of, one day, having a line just as long stretch outside Beyond Full’s doors
“Once you’re in the door, you’ll stay for sure,” he promised in a Shakespeare-esque heroic couplet. You got this, Jeremy.
But for the impatient, why not skip the line and simply use Doordash? Is there something magical about the physical experience of shivering or sweating out on Arrow Street with your friends? We asked Jeff, a Boston University graduate who drove into Cambridge for a cup of BerryLine. Jeff explained to us that “Doordash is too expensive.” We considered explaining to Jeff that it would also melt, but figured Jeff might get a bit annoyed, so we steered clear of the topic.
None of this, though, actually explains why the BerryLine line is so berry long and lines the street each day. The patrons could only give us their questionable reasoning for standing in it. To find the cause, we had to roll up our sleeves and go in.
The fro-yo shop isn’t just a hub of sweet nourishment, but a reliable employer of many college and high school students, including Cambridge Rindge and Latin senior Angie Lambert. She suspects that the shop’s longer lines are due to two factors: increasing clientele from customers posting about their purchases on TikTok and slower service due to old fro-yo machines that overheat quickly and regularly need time to cool down.
“We’re working on getting it fixed,” said Lambert. “But the machines are really expensive to repair.”
Lambert confessed that the increase in customers can be “overwhelming” but that the worst part of the extra business isn’t the stress — it’s the fact that she no longer has the time to get to know the regulars. The demand is just too high for chit chat.
But while the influx of customers may prevent workers on the inside from making connections, back in the line, patrons don’t seem to mind the additional wait.
Northeastern student and tennis player Abby Wilson described her experience missing a fantasy football draft because she and her friends were waiting in line. The silver (berry)lining? The group achieved a new level of friendship through this trauma. When we asked if she would consider taking her entire tennis team to the BerryLine line to bond, she responded, “Honestly, like, yeah.”
As the people in line seemed to get annoyed with us, we decided it was time to leave. But not before one last hard-hitting question: “What’s one word that best describes this line?” Abby said it best: “Journey.”
It all comes back to that age-old question: Is it the journey or the destination?
Well, at BerryLine, it’s both.
