“You can’t get some of these Jellycats outside of New York,” says Hui Zhou, who’s visiting from Shanghai with a group of five friends, as we wait in line at the Jellycat Diner, a specialty pop-up inside of FAO Schwarz. “So that’s why we’re here.”
“We’ve been trying to get a reservation for a while, and we didn’t actually have one until about an hour ago,” says Laura Lofthouse, who’s in her early 30s, owns 15 Jellycats (and counting), and is visiting from the U.K. with her new husband, Callum Hopkins. “We finally saw that one opened up so we dropped everything to come here fast from the Financial District.”
Toni Stinavage, a 44-year-old mom, also came all the way from England, near Coventry. The trip to New York was an 18th-birthday gift for her son Jacob, but besides celebrating with him, visiting the diner “was my top priority” she says. “I may be back,” she even adds. “I’ll see how much spending money I’ve got left.”
After three hours on the scene, I learned that for most people there, the Jellycat Diner was the first reservation they made after deciding to visit New York. As for New Yorkers themselves, I didn’t bump into a single one.
Jellycat sold its first delightfully zany stuffed animals in 1999, when Beanie Baby mania was at an all-time high, but the brand remained mostly off the radar until about three years ago, when TikTok influencers started posting videos of their collections, unboxing piles of stoic capybaras and wide-eyed shrimps, and making Jellycat-inspired cakes. That was really all it took. Now they are so in-demand that new releases regularly sell out in minutes, and the “Jellycatplush” sub-Reddit has 46,000 members. The plushies aren’t cheap — bag charms start at $25, an 11-inch frowning turtle costs $45, and the biggest Jellycats can cost upwards of $1,000 — but that hardly seems a deterrent.
The brand itself is capitalizing with this diner, which opened in the fall of 2023 to serve piping-hot pretend hot dogs, pizza, and burgers. It was so successful that Jellycat opened similar experiences in London, Paris, and Shanghai. And this past September, to much fanfare, the diner launched a brand-new “breakfast menu” of exclusive waffles and pancakes (and, no, none of the food here is real). The lines got so long that the store had to implement a reservation system to manage the crowds.
“People were waiting, in all sorts of weather, for four hours to come in,” says Michelle Pavloff, the diner’s seasonal experience manager. Even with the new, more organized system, time slots are nearly impossible to get: The website only allows bookings up to two months in advance, and right now, the next open slot is more than a month away.
Stinavage’s son Jacob had come on his birthday trip with a request from his girlfriend back home (owner of eight Jellycats) and a hope and prayer to get her the stuffed bouquet of roses from this year’s Valentine’s Day drop. He wouldn’t get so lucky today; FAO Schwarz’s Jellycat outpost never even stocked the florals, or any of the brand’s other Valentine’s Day designs, for fear of the high-demand collection causing in-store chaos.
Part of the hype is for the wait staff. “I graduated from NYU in May, and I’m making my way up the acting ladder one improv bit in the diner at a time,” says server Shy’Peria Brown. She especially likes inviting customers to “jiggle” and dance with her as she pretends to “cook” their plush pancakes. If you’re into it, she says, she might even hand you the spatula and let you make the plushies sizzle. Kaleigh Cece, another recent theater-school-grad employee, even gets recognized from it. “There have been some 11-year-olds that are like, ‘I saw you on TikTok!’”
About halfway through my visit, the mood turns conspiratorial. I got to talking with a mom named Louise Hanna from Houston, Texas, who pulled me aside and pointed to a big turquoise refrigerator door in the corner. It had a small luggage-style padlock on its handle. “See that?” she whispered. “A guy who works here told me they have to keep that door locked because people were stealing the diner boxes they keep stored inside to sell online.”
It turned out to not be entirely true. “So they’re not stealing, exactly, but we’ll have people come in and buy the exclusive diner bundle (which includes a Jellycat plushie, clamshell box, diner to-go bag, enamel pin, and stickers) then sell the items separately to make some extra cash,” said Terrell Way, an actual diner employee. “So we just keep the door shut for now.” Is the Jellycat diner the new Supreme? Later, I found several people on eBay selling everything but the plush or just the stickers or the pins for steep markups.
Beyond the locked fridge, there’s one special Jellycat here that stands above the rest: Fran. She’s a fluffy pile of pancakes with satin syrup and a trio of blueberries on top — and is by far the most popular seller. Perhaps because she is the only diner order with chubby little corduroy legs. (The bagel and waffle have arms, which aren’t as cute.)
Kailey Marriott, a 22-year-old gamer and line cook at a private golf course in Florida, came with her two sisters and chose Fran first before poking around for other more conventional options, like an ear of corn and maybe the croissant. Marriott has been watching Jellycat videos on Instagram and YouTube for years but waited until she could come here, to the diner, to buy her first one. Her ultimate goal is to visit each of the pop-ups around the world. “My next trip is going to either be Paris, because they have little stuffed macarons, or London because they do fish and chips and squeeze a giant lemon Jellycat on them.” Delicious.
Before leaving, I spot Manda and Adaora, a pair of undergrad-student friends from Montclair State University in New Jersey, contemplating a smiling tennis ball (that’s mostly sold out online). “I have a fairly small collection just because they’re so expensive,” Manda said. She doesn’t play tennis but was thinking about getting the ball because she really liked the movie Challengers. “I was interested in the tennis ball too,” Adaora chimes in. “That’s why you saw us staring at it for so long, we were thinking about the financial decision. We could get a tennis-ball plush from anywhere for less than $30, but this one’s face is just so cute.”
A few of our favorite Jellycats
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