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Chocolates and Creams

Here we begin the ice cream queen's research on her home turf, in the city of Toronto. There are more ice cream parlours in this city than I remember there being two years ago, but that said, I think there's still room for a few more. (Plus, they don't do delivery.)

Chocolates and Creams at Harbourfront, on the lake, has been around for ages -- I remember it from when I was little. It advertises itself as the city's best ice cream, and it's probably not far off from saying it. The ice cream is rich, delicious, inexpensive, and there are a ton of flavours. Plus, they also have chocolates and jelly beans.

The mint chocolate chip that I tried was bright green and creamy, and the chocolate chunks were substantial. The serving was generous -- they had to fill that massive waffle cone. Overall, an excellent scoop. A lot of other people must have thought so too because there was a long lineup of people waiting to order.

Jacob ate something chocolate. I think it had nuts in it. I wasn't in a chocolate mood so I didn't try it, but he said it was really good.

Despedida, birthday, goodbye party

It's fitting that the ice cream queen would celebrate her birthday with several (ahem, nearly 3) kilos of ice cream instead of a cake, right?

This was at my birthday and goodbye party with friends from Santillana. The ice cream was from El Lado Bueno. I kept the bag as a souvenir of one of my favourite ice cream places.

Ice cream tour

Top pic: Ana and Chungo's special lunch/meal menu. Standard ham-and-cheese and quiche fare. Note the decor in the background.

Second pic: Outside Faricci's. Note the winter coat. It was a pretty gross day.

Third pic: Faricci's pineapple and peach sherbert. We have to find a way to get around the environmentally unfriendly styrofoam cups.

Bottom pic: Cabaña Tuyu's failure -- mango-orange and alfajor. We weren't pleased.


After a brief hiatus involving an international move, an unfortunate family emergency, finishing up unfinished business and a harried job search (the latter of which still being in progress), the ice cream queen has returned to cyberland.

The ice cream queen’s Argentine send-off involved a day-long ice-cream binge and tour with fellow ice cream queen Ana. The task was to check out and sample several of Belgrano’s more well-known ice cream shops, where we were both pleasantly and unpleasantly surprised.

To standardize our testing (and fend off claims that this was nothing more than an ice cream orgy), we looked at the following variables: free samples and the server’s willingness to provide as many as we asked for, how the ice cream tasted, how the locale was decorated, and the price of a small cup with two scoops.

First stop

The first stop on a wintry July day was at Chungo’s at Virrey del Pino and Amenabar, which is one of Buenos Aires’s more well-known ice cream chains. Taking total advantage of the free sample thing, we tried chocolate with hazelnuts (tastes like Nutella), berry chocolate (which was a chocolaty twist on wildberry or frutos del bosque), bitter chocolate, wildberry and blueberry. The guy behind the counter was very patient, even offering flavour suggestions.

Our flavour selections, however, included passionfruit mousse and caramel-cream cheese-chocolate chunk (mousse de maracuyá y una mezcla original de dulce de leche, queso crema y pedazotes de chocolate). The mousse was excellent and creamy. I loved it but Ana thought it was a little too sweet. However, she was wild about the caramel mixture. I thought it tasted like chocotorta, a sickeningly sweet disgusting-yet-irresistible mix of cream cheese, chocolate cookies and caramel that is the Argentine version of birthday cake (not to mention the love of dentists and fluoride-makers everywhere). We had little visions of kids with sticky hands begging their parents for these flavours.

The decoration at Chungo’s was also cute. Biographies of Giuseppe Mascarpone and Nicolás Sambayón, which not so coincidentally happen to be two super-popular flavours among adults who get the joke.

Willingness to indulge our free sample obsession: excellent
Price rating: at 7.50 pesos for a small cup, this was the most expensive creamery
Flavour rating: the best of the day
Décor: excellent

Second stop

Our second stop was Faricci’s at the corner of Lacroze and Conesa, an impulse stop near Ana’s house. I used to pass Faricci’s on the 42 bus on my way home from work but never stopped inside.

The patient server indulged us and let us sample quite a few flavours, including something with caramel and pieces of Havanna alfajor, tropical lemon with strawberry and melon. None of the flavours made us want to eat them.

We ended up ordering pineapple and peach, which was a bad idea because when fruit-flavoured ice creams are made with canned fruit, you can tell. The fake fruit gives it an acidic, overly sweet flavour that screams “I’m not real!!!” This is the type of ice cream I would eat only if I were totally desperate and didn’t have enough pocket cash for Chungo’s or one of the other premium ice creams. (Yes, I’m a snob.)

Willingness to indulge our free sample obsession: excellent
Price rating: 4.50 for a small cup, the cheapest of the day
Flavour rating: wouldn’t go out of my way to eat this
Décor: green, brown and white -- kind of pleasant

Third stop

The third and last stop of the day was Cabaña Tuyu, at the corner of Cabildo and Maure. Cabaña Tuyu used to be a neighbourhood institution but we’re not sure why it’s still open. One of the first things Ana noticed was that it had lots of candy flavours: kinder, ferrero rocher, bananita dolca and alfajor. There are a few schools around the corner, so we figured they must be trying to attract the under-12 set.

We ordered mango with orange and alfajor – a big mistake. The first crime was that the mango was neon orange, which is a sure sign of heavy doses of artificial flavourings. The second problem was the thick layer of syrup – the slurpee stuff – that had settled to the bottom of the cup. “I can’t eat this,” said Ana. “It leaves a terrible taste in my mouth.”

The atmosphere also left something to be desired (a bottle of Cif, maybe?). The cement floor was dirty and the tables had fake flowers on them, and the fluorescent lighting encouraged us to leave with our half-finished ice cream, which we later tossed in a garbage can outside the store.

I’ve had Cabaña Tuyu before – at 3 a.m. one sticky Friday night after a bowling and beer party at the alley across the street. There were five or six of us, it was hot outside and the traffic was beginning to slow down. Pablo had said that we had to try Cabaña Tuyu and I insisted that we all march over there and have a cone (or a kilo). I don’t remember what any of us ordered, so it mustn’t have been that good or that bad, only unmemorable.

“Cómo cayó Cabaña Tuyu!!” said Ana as we left. How the mighty have fallen. Maybe Cabaña Tuyu only tastes better after a night of drinking.

Price rating: 6 pesos, which totally didn’t justify the quality
Flavour rating: nasty
Décor: awful