A day with Solid Wiggles

The Succession star was among the throng of eager indulgers that snagged a citrusy booze-square from Jack and Jena, the alchemists behind NYC-based Solid Wiggles

Jena packs an order while Jack cheeses for the camera.

Kasey Musgraves slid into their DM’s to sing praises and order another box. They’re a feature at the notorious after-parties of Saturday Night Live, and Kieran Culkin snapped up a few after Succession cleaned up at the Emmys. 

Down a long hallway on the 8th floor of a cold building in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, past a baguette bakery and a chicken hut left vacant, is New York’s latest culinary creation. Something avant-garde but familiar, approachable yet somehow intimidating. Something the esteemed Tatiana’s in Manhattan has atop their dessert menu. If the English language had a word for delightfully strange and delicious, it’d work best here.

It’s Jell-O. With booze. 

More accurately, gelatin (Jell-O is trademarked by the Kraft Heinz corporation and decidedly too gauche for the SNL afters). They’re called Solid Wiggles, a cutesy name for a dynamite young company making deadly-serious treats. 

Jena packs an order

Solid Wiggles is the brainchild of Jack Schramm and Jena Derman. Jack, an NYU graduate turned mixologist, interned for Jena’s catering company. Jena had expertise in scaling up production of food and was once quoted in college as saying; “I just want to make something cool.” So they paired, Jack’s alcohol acumen with Jena’s pastry and production skills and delivered a duo so unique and excellent they’re building an empire. 

“We finally paid our health insurance with this,”  said Jack with genuine thrill. “It’s about time,” said Jena. 

Solid Wiggles preps full sheets of culinary-minded, booze-fused gelatin squares on a daily basis from their 8th-floor kitchen in Brooklyn. They ship nationwide. A Midori Sour, perhaps? Or maybe you fancy a Negroni, or a Painkiller. Each square contains 5% ABV, roughly equivalent to a bite of beer. The Negroni square is particularly pleasant -- the proper notes of Campari and orange without the guttural burn of a heavy pour of gin.  

The taste and novelty are but half this jiggly equation; these cubes are bona-fide pieces of art. Geometric designs, full-petaled flowers, a basketball -- all hand cut, hand-syringed and handmade by Jack, Jena and their hyper-small team. 

“We finally paid our health insurance with this,”

Operations have tripled in size over the past year but you couldn’t tell. Jack and Jena were still cutting and boxing orders on a brisk Wednesday morning, excited about the prospect of the building’s red-tailed hawk making an appearance on the scaffolding outside so we could take photos. 

There are no new ideas under the sun; whoever was quoted as such never found themselves two bites into a Peach Pit gelatin square from Solid Wiggles, made from Ketel One botanicals and real peach, imbued with the patterns of a fourth dimension.

But after all, were we surprised? In the city famous for both the vodka slice and the panoply of global cuisines around each corner, we think we have everything. Until you stumble into something so deranged -- white tablecloth Jell-O? -- it can’t help but to succeed in the city that has no end.

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And you’re better for discovering it, for now you’re inspired and excited and curious. Perhaps in your pantry lurks an ingredient waiting for its pedestal. Maybe you, too, can be piping orange-colored milk jelly into a basketball-shaped cavity, fulfilling orders for a WNBA draft party. 

“We’re hopeful,” said Jack, as Jena mentioned a pitch she made to current Iowa hoops and future WNBA star Caitlin Clark.

Who knows what stage is next for Solid Wiggles. But if we captured a single message during nibbles of their happy-grams, it’s why not?