Frozen Custard Awards – 2025
/I VOWED to eat ice cream once a month, but in 2025 I might have only achieved four or five times all year, so the fair and clear (if inadequately researched) winner was easy to determine. On the hottest day of the summer (not verified) I decided to have breakfast out, so I walked down to the Landmark Family Restaurant near St. Francis, but it was closed because the family were on vacation! Already the heat of the day was upon me, and not thinking I had the strength to walk home, I decided to “cut over” to The Copper Kitchen, on Howell—woefully miscalculating the distance—passing through Tippecanoe, almost to The Town of Lake! Fine breakfast, but those plastic water glasses always taste like ammonia, so I remained dehydrated. I thought I’d catch a bus back north, but it was Sunday, so I decided to walk. Through Saveland Park, up to Humboldt Park, hoping for a little shade, but far too few trees. By now the temperature topping, I don’t know. In desperation, I vowed to stop at the first place announcing “Ice Cream,” and finally, it was, on Oklahoma, The Gyros Stand, its sign sporting: “Frozen Custard.”
The place was empty—immediate seating, I thought—until I found out the reason. No air conditioning! I assumed it was out of order, because if they just didn’t have AC, they’d open windows, have fans, etc. The only one there was one woman working, I guess because she had to. People were coming in for takeout. But I was determined, so I ordered a small bowl of frozen vanilla custard, to eat there. I had had notions of a Greek salad, but once I realized the small interior was not unlike a sauna, I decided to skip the salad. As I waited for her to prepare the dessert, I tried to write in my small notebook, in the “dining room,” while I realized what I was smelling was the bathrooms. That sounds worse than it actually was—they were relatively clean—but it did get me thinking about how it’s interesting that AC hides odors, while heat and humidity really bring out the fragrance! Anyway, I guess what took her awhile was that it was an effort to coax the deeply frozen custard from its tub, in the appropriate proportion, into my small, disposable, plastic bowl (I could have had it take-out, but there was nowhere to escape the sun). And then I ate it. It was the coldest, most dense, most satisfying bowl of frozen vanilla custard I’ve ever eaten! What brand? I don’t know. Good vanilla flavor, too. I’m not sure it wasn’t somehow magical, in some fashion—it couldn’t have been merely the context, the contrast, the situation, the heat stroke, the brain damage, the abstinence, the oppositions, the novelty, the day. Could it? Those things add up, I admit. But for whatever reason, fair or not, scientific or not, repeatable or not—that was the best ice cream (and dessert) I had in 2025.
Randy Russell 2.2.26