After my deeply disappointing experience at Morgenstern's Finest Ice Cream, I was ready to go to an ice cream parlor that never disappoints: Brooklyn Farmacy & Soda Fountain.



Farmacy is basically everything I look for in a restaurant experience. It's a charming atmosphere, they play 50s music on the stereo, and they offer delicious sundaes.



Unlike a place like Ample Hills or Odd Fellows, Farmacy does not have lots of ice cream flavors, or very experimental flavors. They offer about a half dozen flavors made by Adirondack Creamery, which are made with fresh, hormone-free ingredients.

The ice cream is very good on its own, but since this is an old-fashioned soda shoppe, you'd be a fool not to dress it up in a milkshake or a float or (duh) a sundae.



The one on the left is vanilla ice cream with caramel sauce and Farmacy's homemade peanut butter. The one on the right, obviously, is mine. It's a scoop of chocolate ice cream and a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream with hot fudge, whipped cream, and cookie crumbles from Farmacy's fresh-baked cookies.

BOTTOM LINE: Not my favorite standalone ice cream in the city, but unquestionably my favorite place in the city to eat an ice cream sundae.

some thoughts on chocolate calzones/pizzas/panini

There's a new artisanal pizza place in Clinton Hill called Emily. Let me be clear: Brooklyn has more artisanal pizza places already than any one city could ever need. But let me also be clear: artisanal pizza is not about "need." So I went.

Obviously Emily's greatest draw was its s'mores calzone. But I have to admit to being disappointed.



The chocolate was melty, and the marshmallow was melty, and the dough was fluffy, and all that was good-- but those three components didn't really work together right. There were a lot of bites that were just dough, which is wasteful. Also a fair few bites that were just dough and marshmallow, or just dough and chocolate. But too little of this calzone included both chocolate and marshmallow, and it was in those brief tastes that I had the full s'mores experience.

For a better delivery of chocolate pizza from an artisanal Brooklyn pizzeria, I recommend Forcella's nutella pizza. I was already obsessed with Forcella for savory reasons-- their montanara pizza is literally paradigm-shifting-- and when I tried their nutella pizza, I was even more on-board with this place. This is an excellent chocolate-to-dough ratio.



The one that I most seek out, though, is Bocca Lupo's nutella and banana panino. It's just perfect. I would eat any of these Italian desserts again, but Bocca Lupo's is the one that I would journey farthest for.



BOTTOM LINE: Have you noticed that these restaurants call these "calzones," "stuffed pizzas," and "panini," but they are all basically the same dessert? Discuss.

Blue Marble

This evening I went to Blue Marble and got this:



It's chocolate ice cream with chocolate mint cookies inside it. I don't even know what to say. Every bite was pure bliss. The cookie-to-ice cream ratio and the mint-to-chocolate ratio were perfect. I was so focused on eating this ice cream that I nearly walked into a streetlamp.

BOTTOM LINE: Blue Marble knows what they are doing.

Chocolate Cupcake from the Chocolate Room

I had a babysitting job tonight, and, as the parents left the house, they mentioned that they would be going to the Chocolate Room after dinner. I looked at them with hungry eyes that insinuated, please bring me home something to eat, for I am needy and jealous. Fortunately, they did.

David and I are big Chocolate Room fans. Who wouldn't be? It's called the freaking CHOCOLATE ROOM. We once went to a chocolate tasting there, where I became proud owner of a "chocolate tasting wheel," which looks something like this:

There are many dishes that I enjoy at the Chocolate Room. With time, this blog will probably cover all of them. Tonight my babysitting clients brought me home the chocolate cupcake. With chocolate frosting, natch.

The frosting was fantastic. The cake itself was very good, though perhaps drier than I would have liked. (That's kind of the nature of most cupcakes, to be honest.) I hadn't thought I was still hungry, after eating about 100 chocolate chips over the course of my babysitting job-- but then I devoured this whole thing. So I guess I was hungry, after all.

BOTTOM LINE: Truly enjoyable-- and not even my favorite thing to get at the Chocolate Room!