• At twenty-three liters per capita per year, U.S. citizens are the world’s leading ice cream consumers—perhaps because they have such tasty parlors to choose from. Princeton, New Jersey takes its ice cream as seriously as its academia, offering not one but two famed shops. Thomas Sweet at 179 Nassau is an old-fashioned parlor that specializes in blend-ins: your choice of ice cream with up to three kinds of fresh fruit, candies, cookies, or nuts whirled in. (There are also locations in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C.). The Bent Spoon at 35 Palmer Square West, meanwhile, is an “artisan ice cream and good-ingredient bakery” that uses hormone-free dairy and mostly organic produce in its gelato-style treats. The esoteric menu changes daily, but regulars include ginger cardamom, white chocolate with lavender, avocado spiked with blood orange juice, and coffee varieties made with fresh pots of joe from Princeton’s favorite coffee-house, Small World, on 14 Witherspoon Street.
Any Midwesterner will resolutely declare that Graeter’s is the greatest. For well over a century, this family-owned chain has been serving their famed dessert French pot-style, continuously folding their secret mixture of egg custard and fresh cream into itself, so that no air is whipped in. (While a typical pint of ice cream can weigh as little as eight ounces, Graeter’s weighs nearly a pound.) Their all-time best-selling flavor is black raspberry chip, with black raspberries from Oregon and giant shards of chocolate. Try it in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.
Texans, meanwhile, crave Amy’s Ice Cream, founded by a pre-med student who wrote a hot check for her parlor’s first lease in the mid-’80s. The servers wear zany hats and sing as they serve their 300-plus flavors, which include pumpkin cheesecake, bourbon chocolate walnut, honeyed brandy, and—for the truly Texan—Shiner Bock beer. Amy’s has ten shops in Austin, two in Houston, and one in San Antonio.
• A year wouldn’t be long enough to sample every gelaterie in Italy, but it would be fun to try. Most offer frutta (fruit-based) and crema (cream-based) ice cream, as well as sorbetto (dairy-free gelato), granita (semi-frozen coarse ice), and grattachecca (shaved ice flavored with fruit syrup and chunks of fresh coconut and lemon). Romans claim that Il Gelato di San Crispino is not only the best in their city but the free world. The branch near Trevi Fountain at Via della Panetteria 42 is the most popular, but purists head out to the suburbs for the original shops, at Via Acaia 56 and at Via Bevagna 90. In Florence, the best shops are said to be Vivoli on Via dell’Isola delle Stinche and Perche No? on Via dei Tavolini.
• Mexicans also scream for ice cream (although they call it helado). The nation’s best hails from a mountain village near Mexico City called Tepoztlán. Known as tepoznieves, it has flavors ranging from tropical fruits like guanabana, mamey, and tuna (the fruit of a cactus) to concoctions like Queen of the Night (three types of chocolate plus chopped fruit and sesame seeds) and Rose Petals (flowers roasted with honey and butter cream). Practically every village has at least one Paleteria La Michoacana, that sells fruity paletas (popsicles) that are either blended with milk (paletas de leche) or with water and sugar (paletas de agua). The most traditional flavors are melon, strawberry, lime, and chocolate, but they also do innovative flavors like pepino con chile, which consists of cucumber, watermelon, fresh lime juice, and powdered chili peppers. Paleterias La Michoacana have recently popped up in U.S. cities with significant Latino populations as well, including San Antonio, Texas and Brooklyn, New York.
• The most appreciated parlor on the planet is undoubtedly Coppelia, a spaceship-looking structure plopped in a park near the Hotel Habana Libre in the Vedado district of Havana, Cuba. Opened in 1966 as the country’s first democratic ice cream emporium (meaning blacks and the poor were welcome), Coppelia routinely serves about thirty thousand customers a day. Before the so-called “Special Period” (or time of rationing brought about by the collapse of Cuba’s Soviet sugar daddy in 1991), Coppelia offered sundaes and more than twenty-four flavors. Nowadays, they sell only a couple of flavors at a time and lines can be more than an hour long. Yet, it is always delicious and you’ll likely make new friends while waiting.
