Park Slope's Best Ice Cream

New York is in the midst of a heat wave, with temperatures reaching evil heights and staying up there for the foreseeable future.

But don’t fret, people: it also happens to be National Ice Cream Month! As declared by President Ronald “Jellybeans” Reagan in 1984, this is the time for all good Americans to celebrate our cold sweet ally. According to the International Dairy Foods Association, Reagan “recognized ice cream as a fun and nutritious food that is enjoyed by a full 90% of the nation's population.”

So grab a scoop and try to finish it before it melts. Here are our local favorites, in no particular order:

This new cupcake shop, imported from the East Village to Seventh Avenue near Fourth Street, is carrying Texas-made Blue Bell ice cream for the summer. The blackberry cobbler flavor is a swirl of sweet cream and blackberry sauce, dotted with bits of pie crust, like a Southern picnic in a cup. The ice cream is light in texture with a pure, clean dairy taste. And at $1 a scoop, it’s also a stone cold bargain.

The Thai Tea ice cream at this newish spot on Fifth Avenue and St. Mark's Place tastes just like Thai iced tea, but way colder. It turns out that the combination of sweet creaminess and the brisk, slightly bitter edge of tea is a perfect fit for ice cream, a nice pick-me-up in the thick of July heat ($3.00 for one scoop, $5.50 for two). We tried it with Sky Ice’s cucumber-lime sorbet, ridiculously refreshing and not-too-sweet.

Uncle Louie G’s Chocolate Peanut Butter

Uncle Louie G is a neighborhood institution, its fluorescent windows and surly teenaged scoopers drawing lines down the block on hot summer nights. Their chocolate peanut butter ice cream ($3 for a regular scoop) is the perfect snack when you’re feeling a little peckish on your way home from a show at Celebrate Brooklyn. The chocolate base is dark and rich, strangely almost thirst quenching; the streaks of peanut butter are salty and junky, frozen solid and a little crunchy. Find them throughout the neighborhood, including at Seventh Avenue near Ninth Street, Fifth Avenue near Seventh Street, and Union Street near Fifth Avenue. 

’ home-made ice cream ($3.50 a scoop) follows the denser, wetter gelato tradition, which can get messy if you’re eating it from a cone in the sun. The caramel crunch flavor at this Fifth Avenue staple is a beautiful toasty golden color, with a hint of burnt sugar cutting through its formidable sweetness. A light and crisp house-made waffle cone will kick the price up to $5, but it’s hard to resist such a perfect match.

We tried to keep it strictly ice cream here, but the frozen yogurt at Culture, the new yogurt spot on Fifth Avenue near Third Street, is so good we couldn’t keep it off the list. The original plain flavor is wonderful—crafted in-house with milk fresh from an upstate dairy, it's just tart enough so you know it's really yogurt, and so fantastic crowned with Culture’s Vermont Maple or Key Lime topping combinations. But when the delicately herbal plum basil ($3.25 for a small with one basic topping) is on the rotation, we will choose it every time, topped with a simple garnish of slivered almonds.