Chinatown Ice Cream Factory

The default dessert stop after Chinatown dinner. You're welcome to the "exotic" flavors — vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and perhaps a dozen others — but I lean toward the "regulars" like red bean and green tea (shown here).

The texture is smooth and very firm (at least till you hit the sidewalk); flavors are distinct but usually not vivid. The most pointed flavors might be ginger, which has little bits of ginger, and coconut, which has little bits of coconut.

The avocado ice cream is dark green, the color of the skin rather than the flesh, and neither bitter nor sweet; the natural creaminess of the avocado is somehow lost in translation. Lychee sorbet reminds me of pina colada Life Savers (which I was always attracted to); lychee ice cream, less so. Durian ice cream, though the one flavor in the freezer case that's kept covered, proves much less pungent than I'd hoped — less fragrant, certainly, than the durian milkshakes at many downtown Vietnamese restaurants. Pandan has the fragrance of the leaf that adds character to many Southeast Asian dishes, but I keep thinking "leaf." Ube is inoffensively sweet; it's free of the rootlike taste of their taro ice cream, but it also lacks the distinctive yammy flavor of Filipino ube. Black sesame mutes some of the more intrusive flavor notes of its paler cousin. Zen butter takes another felicitous path, paring sesame with peanut butter.

Chinatown Ice Cream Factory
65 Bayard St. (Mott-Elizabeth Sts.)
212-608-4170

Comments

[Flushing Viejo]

Just found your site, following links in CHOW board "Floor plan of Flushing food court". Impressive. Like it a lot.

A suggestion: around Rosedale and Laurelton, there are a lot of Jamaicans and other West Indians; two food places that I like are "Perci's Jerk Hut" and "Golden Crust". Each has more than one location. Perci's jerk is wonderful, and their soups are magnificent.

Look forward to more reading and more eating.