“The model of aesthetic vulgarity,” Theodor Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory (1970) is a “child in [an] advertisement, taking a bite of chocolate with eyes half-closed, as if it were a sin.” If only he had lived to experience the cloying condescensions of Lil Sweet Treat, a gourmet gummy candy emporium where indulgence is offered not as temptation but as a reward for good behavior. Did I really “deserve” this treat, like the sealable plastic bag assured me I did in red squiggly letters? I hadn’t spent the day at my marketing job or taking a hot Pilates class. I am an unemployed writer. I didn’t make sense here.
Lil Sweet Treat is the entrepreneurial confection of Zillennial Willy Wonka Elly Ross. A computer scientist by training, she interned at Blackstone, Google, Apple, and Microsoft before pivoting from Big Tech to Lil Treat in 2024. Ross set up shop in a former vape store in the West Village a little over a year ago, broadcasting the grand opening on TikTok. Today, no less than seven Lil Sweet Treats are sprinkled across the Acela Corridor; four are in New York City.
Unlike Dylan’s Candy Bar, the 2010s Xanadu of human-sized lollipops and death-by-chocolate jouissance, Lil Sweet Treat offers no such escapism. The original location’s banana yellow exterior gestures toward whimsy but stops short of wacky, which would be cringe. The itty-bitty interior is standard-issue start-up minimalism. The floors are a gray and the walls are clad in gleaming, white subway tiles. The confiserie, mostly of continental origin—sour Dutch Piglets, Czech Wiggle Worms, German Fruity Beans—is pitched to the discerning “candy connoisseur” and rings up to around nineteen dollars a pound.
“wage war on nostalgia and bourgeois taste”
What pleasures might be found in a lil sweet treat? Can deliverance from the dreaded nine-to-five (to quote Dolly Parton’s immortal workers’ anthem, which played on speaker during my visit) be doled out in a “bouncy” quarter-sized bonbon dubbed the “Happy Button”? At first I thought happiness might be found in scooping heaps of Mimosa Snuggle Bears into the store’s branded baggies. That sounded fun. But the vessel was too small and it was structurally impossible to get more than a few lil treats in at a time. At Lil Sweet Treat, everything is cute, infantilized, little—even the word itself.
Presumably, one might take pleasure in the communal experience of sampling different treats with friends. But, then, there is no place to sit in Lil Sweet Treat and nowhere to linger out front. The store’s spatial choreography instead instructs you to wait in line, buy a few candies, and eat them by yourself at home.
Vulgar art, Adorno tells us, repackages repressed desire in a form that neutralizes its threat to the status quo. Today, our desires have been miniaturized along with our attention spans and disposable incomes. A can of soda transmogrifies into a “fridge cigarette,” a snack into “girl dinner.” Pleasure speaks in a coy, self-conscious baby talk. A T-shirt on a porn star professes, “I love my gay little boyfriend”; a magazine headline flaunts a “fancy little recipe” of cured egg yolk on a rice cracker. Perhaps the real question isn’t whether we deserve our treat but why we’ve settled for so little.