Just Desserts 9: Chinatown Ice Cream Factory

RESTAURANT: Chinatown Ice Cream Factory
LOCATION: 65 Bayard St.
DATE: June 5, 2005
DESSERT: One Scoop each of Pumpkin Pie and Almond Cookie Ice Cream on a Sugar Cone; One Almond Cookie
BEVERAGE: None
PRICE: $5.50

A proposed television advertising campaign for Chinatown Ice Cream Factory (if I was their marketing analyst, which, sadly, I am not)

(close-up of Chinatown’s rich, delicious ice cream being scooped onto cone – preferably either the lychee or almond cookie flavors)

Announcer: It’s time to turn in your fortune cookies, folks. For all these years you’ve thought a generic sentence, so lacking in specificity as to make even Ms. Cleo wince, was the proper way to end a Chinese dinner. How wrong you’ve been.

(cut to outside of Chinatown Ice Cream Factory on any given night. Bayard Street is electric with energy and the line extending out the creamery’s door and onto the street is unsurprisingly long. They wait patiently, but enviously glare at the cones and spoonfuls of decadence in the hands of customers already served)

Announcer: Why sublimate your desires, why not give into your urges? Throw the crack-pot predictions in the garbage and rush to Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. What better way to follow up Peking Duck then lychee ice cream or orange sorbet? If you want to remember your fortune cookie days, try the almond cookie – crumbles of buttery, sweetly almond cookie incorporated into luscious vanilla. You can even get the cookie by itself if you want and believe you me, just like John Lennon, its amazing on its own. Had green tea at dinner? Have it again in your ice cream for dessert. Red bean too adventurous? What’s more American than pumpkin pie (well apple, but pumpkin is a close second)?

(cut to the Halloween colored scoop of pumpkin pie ice cream in profile. Orange beads drip down the sides of the cone, practically begging to be licked)

Announcer: This ice cream begs the questions – why go a la mode, when you can just go all in one? Pumpkin pie was made for ice cream and ice cream for pie, so bringing the two together is only natural. Think of it as cutting out the middle man. Bask in the sweetness, savor the unique combinations. Haagen-Dazs may be located a block away, but haven’t you heard? European imperialism is dead, so too the EU. So go East, instead. We promise, once you realize the merits of the Factory, like Andy Warhol, you’ll never want to go anywhere else.

(end on close-up of children smiling as they devour ice cream, their messy faces generating the "Full-House" like chorus of “awws” that everyone knows no parent can resist)

RATING: 8.3/10