Sugar Bowl in Scottsdale, Arizona

I went to Arizona for the first time in my life, and I stayed than 24 hours. Fortunately, I can find ice cream in less than 24 hours.

Sugar Bowl is in Scottsdale, and it was founded in 1958, as perhaps you can see below.



It's an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, with everything done up in pink. Eloise would love it here. I loved it here! Sugar Bowl has been featured many times in "Family Circus," which makes sense; it harkens back to a simpler era, just as that comic strip does.



The menu consisted of big sundaes and parfaits. Nothing pretentious or Brooklyn about this place. You know I love my Brooklyn, but sometimes I also just love a big heaping mound of ice cream with various sauces and creams poured all over it.



This is what I got. It was a parfait with a scoop of chocolate, a scoop of mint chocolate chip, mint-chocolate sauce, chocolate sauce, and whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles on top. This was not the most intensely creamy, flavorful, whatever ice cream I've ever had, and yet it was everything I wanted. With a cherry on top. The NYC ice cream parlor that I was most reminded of was Eddie's, in Queens.



We each got our own ice cream so nobody had to share. That is my dream come true.



BOTTOM LINE: Located near Phoenix, Arizona, this 55-year-old soda shop is a delight not for ice cream snobs, but for ice cream lovers.

Eddie's Sweet Shop

The weather this weekend was beautiful, and beautiful weather means one thing: ice cream. I was tromping around Forest Park, in Queens, an outdoor space that I selected for my tromping because of its proximity to Eddie's Sweet Shop.

This is what Eddie's Sweet Shop looks like:





It's close to a century old and has a wonderful old-fashioned vibe, complete with classic frozen concoctions like malts, egg creams, and massive banana splits heaped with homemade whipped cream. Apparently an episode of Boardwalk Empire was shot here. These dudes have been here since Eddie's opened:



I ordered a float, which is a milkshake of the flavor of your choice, poured atop a scoop of ice cream, again the flavor of your choice. I got a scoop of mint chocolate chip floating in a chocolate shake. You know, because I am so unpredictable. Here is what my float looked like when it arrived at my table:



Here is what my float looked like about ten minutes later:



I will say that the quality of the ice cream was okay. It wasn't intensely flavorful, like Fresco. It didn't have a lot of crazy flavors, like Ample Hills. "Maple Walnut" was about as crazy as it got, here at Eddie's.

But I forgave them all of this because they were not trying for the artisan food crowd. They predate that nonsense (nonsense that David and I fully embrace, obviously), and they may outlast it, as well. They're an old-fashioned soda shop. The place was filled with a elementary school girls' soccer team who'd just won a match, and parents who were getting scoops for their kids while buying giant sundaes for themselves. It's okay that the chocolate ice cream wasn't made from Michel Cluizel 72% or whatever. It still made me feel happy.

BOTTOM LINE: The ice cream itself is adequate, and the ice cream-eating experience is a true delight.