Hello team.
I have a feeling that if you asked most Londoners for their favourite ice-cream spot, the answer, particularly when the sun is out, would be some approximation of “the closest half-decent one”. Most of us that care about food have heard people rhapsodising about Chunk Provisions, Charms, Bake Street and Soft & Swirly. We have dimly gleaned that if you venture to the back of an unremarkable Wood Green newsagent, you’ll be rewarded with one of Kabul Ice Cream’s cones of gravity-defying two-toned Afghan soft serve. We have slurped drips of Gelupo ricotta and sour cherry from our fingers and surreptitiously retrieved tumbled flakes of Happy Endings’s Malty One from the folds in our T-shirts. In short: we think we know the good stuff.
And yet, ice-cream’s status as a snobbery-proof treat with a reliably high pleasure floor means few of us are beyond an emergency Amorino or a syrup-striped 99 Flake from a van daubed in nightmarish unlicensed depictions of Disney characters. When it comes to the cold stuff on a hot day, availability, nostalgia and proximity often seem to trump the instincts that usually govern our food choices.
Which is why I have started to wonder if the annual frenzy of ice-cream parlour guides and gelateria recommendations blithely skips over some basic fundamentals of knowledge. What actually makes a particular ice-cream purveyor worthy of a cross-town pilgrimage? Does a long queue always denote exceptional quality? And is there ever still a place for industrially produced Mr Whippy cones alongside hypey artisanal choices?
“Honestly, to me, the difference between good and great ice-cream is textural,” says Ruby Tandoh, whose longstanding, unabashedly obsessive chronicling of the dessert genre (in the first half of 2023 alone, she tried 343 different London ice-creams and her total this year is 250) has yielded the recently published Ice Cream City: a comprehensive Vittles pocketbook that is her opus to London’s swirls, scoops and sundaes. “It’s easy enough to make an ice-cream taste good, but doing that while ensuring it freezes smoothly, without ice, without graininess, without weird gloopiness or stickiness – that’s the hard part.”
Kitty Travers of La Grotta Ices – your favourite ice-cream-maker’s favourite ice-cream-maker and someone who revolutionised the form with inventive, hyper-seasonal flavours – tends to agree, but goes further. “Texture-wise, I like an ice-cream with density [and] a good body that doesn’t melt too quickly or seem foamy,” she says. “And you should be able to really taste the ingredients. So, if it’s dairy-based, you should taste fresh cream – sweetness is not a flavour and shouldn’t be the predominant taste.”
This idea, of ice-cream, gelato and sorbet as a frozen expression of ripeness and flavoursome, fresh components, is the not-so-secret weapon shaping London’s current scene. An approach that benefits from the fact that lots of the scoops and swirls that many of us grew up on – generally made with wholesale stabiliser-filled UHT premix cartons and base mix powders – often barely qualify as “ice-cream” and feel a world from, say, the lavish, high-gloss creaminess of Bar Etna’s coffee soft serve. “I’ve been to a [Mr] Whippy van with a temperature gun and taken the temperature of an ice-cream that was about 4 degrees when it should really be below -6 degrees,” says Terri Mercieca, the Sydney-born founder of Happy Endings (which is currently popping up at 40ft Brewery Blackhorse) and creator of a life-changing sour cream soft serve that is up there with the best I’ve ever had.
“And also air is a big factor. We use a gravity-fed rather than a pump-fed machine as it gives us a denser product that has about 20 per cent overrun [the air that gives soft serve its signature aerated fluffiness] and more ice-cream. Some Whippy vans are doing 100 per cent overrun, so they’re basically selling air.” Van ice-cream’s longstanding reputation as a cheaply produced, hollow confection sold by brazen opportunists is, it turns out, not completely unfounded.
Still, if you have an overrun-laden soft spot for the Whippy van’s janky musical chimes and lurid syrups, there is good news. Mercieca (who got her start manning the McDonald’s soft serve machine as a teenager) stresses that there really is variety and quality to be found. The sense that one almost-identical van can be “better” than another is not a hallucination. “There’s the best Whippy vans and there’s the worst,” she says. “Some are using bad carton pre-mixes, where milk is listed way down in the ingredients, and some are using ultra-premium mixes.” If you spot the black and gold flash of a Jersey Dairy, or even a Comelle Dairy carton then you know you’re in decent hands. This all feeds into the mystery of ice-cream, the sense of discovery, that’s part of the fun.
Broadening it out to scoopable ice-creams and gelatos, what are the other imprimaturs of quality? “I usually like to go to a gelato shop where they have those pozzetti, round drum freezers with the lids on top,” says Mercieca. “Partly because they’re fucking expensive so, you know, their ice-cream better be good. But also because ice-cream needs to be protected from the elements. Any ice-cream that’s fluffed up to the nines, unless I know it’s good, I tend to avoid like the plague.”
Meanwhile, Tandoh is firm in her belief that the boundless variety of ice-cream, its different styles and budget categories, should be central to how we consider and appreciate it. “There is no one gold standard for ice-cream,” she says. “It’s like Crufts – Best in Class for gelato looks very different to Best in Class for kulfi. That’s the magic of it.”
So join the queue for ethereally smooth and balanced salted chocolate at Minus 12° in Herne Hill. Devour chewy, riotous ube blueberry muffin at Big Kid or have a Proustian moment with a frost-bearded Zzapp lolly outside a pink Tonibell van. Just remember to keep an open mind, an inquisitive palate and a keen eye on those inevitable drips.
The Counter is a weekly column from award-winning restaurant writer and broadcaster Jimi Famurewa. Sign up to get The Counter first, sent to your inbox every Wednesday.
