Ice cream is summertime magic, cooling us down and offering a sweet escape when the City of Angels tends toward hellish temperatures, or is otherwise subjected to the vagaries of global weirding. In rain or sweltering heat, we hold onto our cones.
L.A.’s love affair with ice cream stretches back to before Baskin met Robbins, when they combined their Snow Bird and Burton ice cream parlors to create the Baskin-Robbins chain and their 31st flavor — chocolate mint — in the 1940s. They were preceded by turn-of-the-century soda fountains, among them Fair Oaks Pharmacy, which opened in 1915 in South Pasadena. Alhambra’s Fosselman’s served its first customers in 1937.
And while we’ll always have a soft spot for iconic Fosters Freeze soft serve and locally made Thrifty’s, we now have options galore: small-batch ice cream made daily with organic milk, vegan shakes, Mexican paletas with chunks of fresh fruit, soft-serve-stuffed pastries and more. Ice cream makers are innovators, pushing techniques, flavors and ingredients into new territories.
Local restaurants also have stepped up with frozen desserts that span massive bowls of silky shaved ice and decadent sundaes worth saving room for after dinner. We’ve even got the scoop on how to get that perfectly formed sphere of ice cream for your bowls at home and are celebrating the ingenuity of every childhood’s hero — the ice cream man. Follow along as we dig into a summer full of ice cream.
