The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Can Connecticut ice cream be ranked?
Arethusa Farm Ice Cream was recently ranked as the best ice cream in Connecticut by Food & Wine Magazine, but local ice cream reviewer Zack Goldman only gives it an overall score of 6 out of 10. Goldman took to Reddit last week to publish his personal rankings after a year of tastetesting over 100 ice cream shops in Connecticut during the COVID-19 To pandemic. complete his ranking, Goldman said he ordered chocolate chip ice cream at every shop he visited to have a standardized ranking system, and because “that’s usually the kind of flavors most places would have.”
His findings gave Sweet Claude’s in Cheshire and Twisters Ice Cream in Mystic top scores of 10, while stops like Buttonwood Farm Ice Cream in Griswold and Wells Hollow Creamery in Shelton were given scores of 2.
TWO LOCALS SAMPLED THE STATE’S ICE CREAM TO FIND OUT
Goldman said these rankings are for his own enjoyment, not to pit local ice cream shops against each other.
“I think they can be ranked personally,” he said. “Everyone has different tastes. My tastes are not going to be someone else’s taste. In terms of the ranking system for myself, I think I can rank it — but these aren’t the ‘official’ rankings.”
But that didn’t stop commenters on Reddit from weighing in. Goldman’s post in the r/Connecticut subreddit — which contained a Google spreadsheet with a detailed ranking of every ice cream shop in the state that “either makes their own ice cream or gets their ice cream from a distributor” — garnered 76 comments as of July 21. Each commenter expressed their own assessments of how the ice cream shops should be ranked.
“Arethusa is expensive?” one commenter wrote. “For $4 you get a giant double scoop of ice cream. They beat every other place in that respect.”
“Buttonwood overall a 2 ???? I mean you obviously worked hard at this, but having Buttonwood as a 5 in terms of quality and a 2 overall is a complete joke as far as that individual rating goes,” one commenter said.
Goldman said he considered factors such as a shop’s flavor variety, the ice cream quality and the environment or ambience, as well as the availability of mix-ins or toppings. With all these aspects considered, Goldman — who said the project “took almost as much research time as driving time” — has taken notice of commenters offering their opinions
and debating his findings.
“People are very passionate,” he said. “I’ve got lots of people telling me I’m wrong and telling me that I need to do more than I did…People are telling me that I ranked them wrong and that chocolate chip wasn’t fair because places have specialty ice cream that I didn’t try .... The other piece of it, too, is that I got one ice cream from each place — maybe they had a bad day or I just didn’t have a strong enough craving for ice cream somewhere.”
‘It gave me something to do’
The whole idea to sample and rank Connecticut ice cream stemmed from the West Hartford native’s attempt to fill his time at home with something fun to do during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Returning home from graduate school in St. Louis, Mo., in what was supposed to be his spring break, Goldman said he wanted to carry on his “elite” Yelp reviewer status — something he’s done in the past for the “pretty good perks” it comes with. The pandemic forced him to pick something other than restaurants to review since many were closed.
“I was like, ‘Well, I guess I could just eat ice cream because I can still do that,’” he said. “So I started doing that to maintain my Yelp status, but then I was going to a lot of ice cream places, so at that point, I thought, ‘I should start comparing these against each other.’”
As the pandemic continued, so did Goldman on his ice cream endeavors, and he ended up with an “official tally” of 101 ice cream spots he tried. Goldman said some people thought he was crazy for driving around the state to sample different ice cream. But for him, it was just a fun way to pass time.