Would You Wait Four Hours for Frozen Yoghurt? Inside Yo-Chi's London Mania

At 6am on opening day, there was already a queue outside Yo-Chi at 81-85 Notting Hill Gate. By mid-morning the line ran down the high street, and by the weekend it stretched to four hours. Across the road, a woman named Aimee Steinberg had appointed herself the unofficial queue correspondent, posting live updates from her flat window to a public that kept asking for more: “Can we get a midday update?” All of this, for frozen yoghurt.

If you have never lived in Australia, the magnitude of this probably does not compute. Yo-Chi is a Melbourne-born brand, founded in 2012, that grew from four stores in 2020 to more than 75 across Australia, and back home it is closer to a nightclub than a dessert shop. Co-owner Oliver Allis has said they run bouncers on the door on Friday and Saturday nights, that people go on dates there, that the mix of ages is the point. The London store is the brand’s first in the UK and its first anywhere in Europe: more than 2,000 square feet across two floors, room for 120 guests, an in-store DJ booth, and the brand’s strawberry disco ball.

The product is the reason the line exists, so here it is. Nine self-serve frozen yoghurt flavours, eight of them 98 percent fat free, made with real Australian cow’s milk rather than powdered mixes, with live probiotics. The signature tart is the one the regulars swear by, and The Infatuation calls it the best of the lot. Salted butterscotch, coconut, and a strawberry cream that tastes, in their words, like a grown-up Frube. Dairy free, vegan friendly, gluten friendly, and nut free options exist. Then the topping station: more than 30 of them, from lychee and dragonfruit to cornflakes, candy kittens, choc chunk cookie cake, raw cookie dough, pistachio spread, kiwi fruit pearls, and a Nutella fountain. Fresh fruit is cut every day. You pull your own swirl, you load your own cup, and you pay by weight, which indy100 warns can get eye-wateringly expensive once the cookie dough starts piling up.

Why London, and why now? The demand was already here. Brits who had fallen for Yo-Chi on Australian holidays had been campaigning for a UK store for years, and the brand’s arrival was teased on The Girls Bathroom podcast by British influencers Sophia Tuxford and Cinzia Baylis-Zullo, who had discovered it in Australia and raved about it to their audience. A huge influencer launch went off ahead of the August 20 opening, the social media storm followed, and TikTok did the rest. One user, Lucy Sedgwick, vowed that Yo-Chi is “the single greatest export of that nation,” and told the sceptics, the ones saying it is just frozen yoghurt, not to listen to them. Google Trends recorded a 160 percent increase in searches for “frozen yoghurt” and a 1,900 percent rise in “froyo” in the three months around the launch.

Here is the counter, and it comes from the toughest table in the argument. The Infatuation’s review calls Yo-Chi solid fro-yo, the biggest flavour selection they have seen in London, and then delivers the only number that matters: should you wait more than 25 minutes in the queue? No. The yoghurt is genuinely good. Four hours is not about the yoghurt. Four hours is about being there, about the cup in your hand outside the store, about the night out disguised as dessert.

So the question stands, and it is the whole debate: would you wait four hours for frozen yoghurt? Team Wait says the line is the experience, the DJ is playing, the cup is a trophy, and you will tell this story for years. Team Walk says 25 minutes is the ceiling, the topping bar will still be there tomorrow, and no swirl is worth half a working day. What did we get wrong?