Victory Garden and Cones

Om Nomz Hero Note to Self: I need more soft serve ice cream in my life

Lowfat...so that means I can eat 2x as much of it?

I realized I have almost sampled all the frozen confection shops in the vicinity of Christopher Square and I am kind of proud of that is a super-glutton way. It is something I keep in mind when I run every morning and justify my sadist behavior. Enough about my own problems I finally got to try the newest on the block, Victory Garden and one of the old ice cream standbys Cones. Strangely enough, both are not gelato shops!

I started out by going to Victory Garden which not only is doing soft serve ice cream, which is a nice change up but it is goat milk soft serve. Victory Garden plays the farm fresh card hard touting using fresh local goat milk. Walking into Victory Garden can leave you a bit unsure that they serve anything edible let alone ice cream, the space is small and sterile looking, but after you get past the fact that you may of accidently stepped into a cosmetic store the warm service is assuring and helpful in deciding on what you want. They have a limited number of flavors that can vary depending on the day and when I went it was a rose, honey lavender, the choco-mastic, plain and a yogurt. I expected the ice cream to taste similar to goat cheese ice creams I have tasted in the past so I went with a mix of the chocolate and the honey lavender. They also have various toppings which are seen rarely out of a Baskin Robbins anymore but they were offering different ones such as wheat germ, honey, strawberries and even halvah, a crumbly Middle Eastern sesame candy.  I went with the halvah which I was told that they make themselves.  The ice cream had a crisp and refreshing taste and was not as texturally creamy but it was still smooth and if you had goat cheese ice cream in the past, it did not have the tangy barnyard aftertaste either. I expected to like the chocolate more but I found myself liking the honey lavender and wanting more of that, the flavors were playful and subtle and the wisps of lavender made me wanting more. 

Goat Milk Ice Cream Soft Serve

One serving of ice cream would be enough for one person, but in a blog called the Om Nomz Hero, proceeded to walk down Bleecker and go to Cones, the Argentinean ice cream shop. From a bit of research, Argentinean style ice cream is like a hybrid of ice cream and gelato in which it is suppose to have to intensity of flavors that gelato has but the ice cream are more similar to well traditional ice cream. I sampled some of their ice creams before I decided on what I wanted and I tried their corn ice cream because I have always liked corn ice cream and given they are a South American ice cream shop, they should be able to do that right. Unfortunately the corn ice cream was tooth decaying sweet and the corn tasted artificial and canned and given that corn is in season, this flavor let me down. I ended up with the mascarpone with tutti frutti and the zaboyone (hey that’s how they spelled) the moscato-spiked Italian cream. The mascarpone, while it was smooth and creamy the zaboyone unfortunately had ice crystals in it which downgraded the ice cream making me feel I got hosed.

Cones Ice Cream - Marscapone with Tutti Fruitti and Zabaoyone

The ice cream at Cones did not seem like anything special and did not stand out to me especially with the service when the dude gave me the laziest explanation of the zaboyone and then ignored me while a co-ed walked in. Victory Garden, as much as they push the natural and healthiness undertones on to you, has legitimately good ice cream and it is good to have some soft serve that that is not from a Red Mango or Pinkberry.

Victory Garden

31 Carmine Street

 New York, NY 10014

www.victorygardennyc.com/

Cones

272 Bleecker St
New York, NY 10014