Boston, eh? Professional Forays #15 (J.P. Licks) and #16 (Christina's)

The weekend of April 8-10, I was lucky enough to cover the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston, MA (read my report-back for Ms. here), and took that opportunity to sample a couple of Boston's more reputable ice cream joints.  In case you had trouble interpreting that first sentence, let me spell it out for you: The weekend of April 8-10, I used the NCMR as an elaborate, foxy ruse to sample a couple of Boston's more reputable ice cream joints.

Boston's ice cream parlors are myriad and mythic: Gourmet magazine recorded eight noteworthy parlors, and it should be noted that one of my NYC favorites, Emack and Bolio's, got its start here too.  Bostonians' appetite for ice cream is also the stuff of legend; a food writer friend of mine, Indrani Sen, has attempted to explain why residents of this wretchedly cold New England city eat more ice cream per capita than anywhere else, and could only conclude that the city's high student population ensures a plentiful supply of young people looking for a cheap date locale.   NB: Ben and Jerry reached the same conclusion.


First stop was J.P. Licks, since it was around the corner from the Thai place where my best friend Katie and I had dinner.  Spring was still in previews, but despite the 40-degree-weather, students were lined up for their cones.  Many of them did in fact appear to be on dates, and I was briefly reminded how much of my college-era courtship revolved around ice cream.  None of that ended particularly well, but I refrained from telling the young lovers that.


J.P. Licks does a lot of community work, which is commendable, but the ice cream - I got Oreo cookie dough and mint oreo - was merely okay.  It was very creamy, but as I've whined before, creamy at the expense of flavorful.  I should probably give ice cream a handicap since it's clear I prefer gelato to old-fashioned ice cream, but I can't believe that it's impossible to make rich, creamy, American-style ice cream that's also flavorful.  I don't see why a high butterfat content should preclude a strong, clear flavor, unless that's chemically impossible (chemists, feel free to weigh in.)

Happy face!

The following night Katie and I walked over to Christina's, in Inman Square, where I also picked up a fabulous little vintage black dress.  Christina's is Katie's favorite, and had also been recommended to me by several trusted sources.  I sampled their famous Burnt Sugar, which was nice - like a sophisticated, not-as-sweet caramel flavor - and the carrot cake, which did nothing for me (I'd rather eat a real piece of carrot cake.)  Far more impressive was the magisterial malted vanilla, a very malty, very vanilla-y flavor that I could honestly eat until I turned comatose.  I also got Mexican chocolate, which could have been more chocolate-y, upon reflection (it was very Mexican, in the sense that the cinnamon was prominent), and coffee Oreo, an oft-overlooked combination if there ever was one.

Empty bowl --> sad face.

While the flavors - especially that malted vanilla - won me over, the texture left something to be desired.  It was slightly aerated, as though their freezing machine was faulty or they'd used some fillers or stabilizers that prevented it from being as dense and pure as one (me) would have wanted.  I don't know what's stopping them from going all-out on perfection.  It could be the jack of all trades, master of none phenomenon: does offering fifty flavors make it impossible to give each one the attention it deserves?

The overwhelming selection at Christina's.

J.P. Licks, 1312 Mass Ave, 617 - 492 - 1001, open Monday-Friday 6am - midnight, Saturday-Sunday 8am - midnight, for more locations, click here.

Christina's, 1255 Cambridge St, (617) 492-7021

Professional Foray #11, Emack and Bolio's, Houston Street, New York

Zagat's, the Scoop on Cones, and my friend Oscar all think this is some of the best ice cream in New York City.  Is it?  They definitely have ground-breaking flavors, and for someone whose benchmark is Cookies and Cream, I was delighted to hear from the proprietor that E & B were the first company to put Oreos into ice cream, in 1975.  "That's why it's called 'The Original Oreo,'" she explained.  

Since 1975, the instinct to throw Oreos into ice cream has gone unrestrained, resulting in such triumphs as peanut butter Oreo, and my favorite, Grasshopper Pie: mint chip ice cream - WITH OREOS.  I am so, so grateful to this company for replacing the "or" (as in "mint chip or mint Oreo?") and replacing it with that vastly preferable conjunction, "and."  The chocolate is very rich and tasty, as is the Cosmic Crunch - vanilla ice cream, caramel swirl, chocolate chips, walnuts, and cookies.  The "Deep Purple" black raspberry flavor is also divine - much more flavorful than the wan, rather artificial stuff I'm used to seeing.

You may have noticed I'm dodging the aforementioned question.  It may very well be the best ice cream in New York, and I appreciate that they were using non-hormonally-charged milk way before anyone else, but my book, it's slightly too rich.  It is super-premium ice cream, meaning it has a butterfat content of, most likely, above 14% (the International Dairy Foods Association doesn't have specific guidelines on this, but this is commonly accepted), much higher than the 5-8% that's normally found in gelato.  And I, my friends, have been eating a lot of gelato lately.  When it came time to take charge of my double-scoop cone of Original Oreo and Grasshopper pie, I was barely equipped to handle it.  

It was like training for a marathon by running around the Central Park reservoir once a week for a month.  I just wasn't ready.  My body couldn't take it.  The ice cream felt dangerously rich; I could hear it whispering for an angioplasty as it slid down my throat.  I needed gulps of water between bites.  But that said, it sure tasted great.  And I've been back - training, as it were - several more times since then.

Professional Foray #4, Blue Marble, Brooklyn, NY

Wednesday night, after an excellent meal at The Grocery on Smith Street with my genius friend/professional hero Michelle Goldberg, we hopped on our bikes and headed down Atlantic Avenue to the Blue Marble Ice Cream shop.  This location has more flavors than the one on Court Street.  We almost missed our chance, since the kindly chef at The Grocery, who spends so much time in the dining room you'd think he wishes he was a waiter, informed us that he makes the best ice cream in the world, after which our check was suspiciously slow in coming.  

Anyway, we made it.  I had read about their strawberry flavor on Yelp or a similar site, where someone was raving that it was the greatest they'd ever tasted.  It does have a very pronounced, tart strawberry flavor, but to my kiddie palate, it was slightly too tangy.  I can appreciate the appeal it would hold for more sophisticated ice cream connoisseurs, or for purists.  But I like an emphasis on the cream in my ice cream, and this tasted too fruity to me.  I also tried root beer flavor, which tasted like a root beer float, except without the wonderful textural interplay of fizzy soda and creamy vanilla ice cream.  Instead, those two sensations and flavors get mushed into one single not-as-delicious and even mildly disconcerting experience.

In the end, I went for (surprise) cookies and cream, chocolate and black cherry.  From here forward, I'm going to use cookies and cream, pending availability, as my benchmark flavor, as well as chocolate, the same way one can judge a Lebanese restaurant by its hummus and kibbeh.  Why?  Both of those flavors leave very little margin for error: either do them well, or go home. 

Soft serve in Rwanda; courtesy of Blue Marble Ice Cream

In Blue Marble's case, they were both tasty, but nothing exciting.  The ice cream itself is of a very high quality; they use milk and cream from an organic dairy co-operative in Pennsylvania where the cows eat grass (as opposed to all the other wretched scum they normally eat in a feedlot, according to Michael Pollan).  But neither of those flavors knocked me off my feet.  The black cherry with chocolate chips was very good, however - an upscale, organic and altogether smoother and more successful rendition of Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia.  I'll be going back for a few other flavors (ginger and mint chip, for example) soon.

This company is notable, if not for its chocolate ice cream, for its social efforts.  They are promoting ice cream as a development solution in Rwanda, use eco-friendly materials and packaging, use organic sugar and serve organic coffee, and support local Brooklyn bakeries by selling bagels and brownies and the like in their shop.  I know it's a cliche to call such a yuppie paradise a "yuppie paradise," but it really is one, without being obnoxious.  It's just a nice place where concerned parents can treat their children and themselves to ice cream without worrying about pesticides and poisons and corn syrups and other demons.

Blue Marble Ice Cream, 420 Atlantic Avenue, 718-858-1100, 186 Underhill Avenue (Prospect Heights), new location at 196 Court Street (Cobble Hill), www.bluemarbleicecream.com, MiniScoops are $2.90, $4.25 and $5.15, regular scoops are $3.89, $5.75, and $6.95.

Professional Foray #1: The Odeon's ice cream cart

Last night my friend Helen and I went on my first professional tasting trip last night, to the Odeon's ice cream cart.  Thank you to my friend Maisie for sending the tip, by the way.  Helen, who had graciously arrived for dinner carrying a six-pack of Baked by Melissa nano-cupcakes, cheerfully accepted that our dessert was going to have more courses than our dinner.

What a delicious little gimmick.

The Odeon's ice cream cart is right in front of the restaurant, underneath the striped awning.  The management has sweetly put several benches out on the sidewalk on West Broadway, so ice cream customers can enjoy the sight of strolling Eurotrash and Tribeca families, attractive down to the toddler, while they savor their cones.  The waffle cones are house made, as is the ice cream, which is made fresh every day, three flavors per day, including butter pecan, strawberry, rocky road (I will be going back expressly to sample this flavor when the time is right), pistachio and banana vanilla wafer.

Last night there was good news and bad news.  The bad news was the mint chip, which had an overtly herbal peppermint flavor that tastes more like a stick of gum or a swig of mouthwash than ice cream.  The good news was the cookies and cream, one of my favorite flavors, which had huge, generous chunks of homemade chocolate cookies.  The cookies were large and dry and crumbly enough to stay crispy and provide real textural contrast to the ice cream, although they didn't have the lardy Oreo-style cream filling that makes commercial cookies and cream sometimes strangely satisfying (I'm talking about when that cream filling starts coating your mouth because the cold of the ice cream means the fat molecules aren't melting as swiftly as they should be.)  The coffee was also excellent news - the flavor, in its sweetness and delicacy, reminded me of Haagen Dazs, but the texture was softer and lighter, and nicely melty.  $4 for one scoop, $6 for two.

145 West Broadway, (212) 233-0507, www.theodeonrestaurant.com/ (call for flavors of the day)

National Ice Cream Day 2011

By the way, last Sunday July 18th was National Ice Cream Day.  I confess I forgot to observe this holiday with the gravity it deserves, but I did have Ciao Bella cookies and cream gelato the day before and, perhaps because I could secretly sense that Sunday was the big day, I requested a scoop of vanilla gelato to go on top of my iced mocha at Via Quadronno.

How did you celebrate?

To make up for my offense, I am going to begin planning next year's National Ice Cream Day festivities right now. What should I do?  Who wants to join?  Any ideas?