We might still be squarely stuck in mid-February, but with sunny skies and temperatures above the 40s this week, it’s beginning to feel like spring in Evanston. After a harsh period of wintertime blues, I’m ready to take advantage of this warmer weather the best way I know how — with a good cup of ice cream.
Luckily, Moo Joe’s Ice Cream has been serving scoops out of its Evanston location since December. The shop, which replaced Parlor on Central, plans to have a grand opening celebration once springtime officially arrives.
Until then, it’s operating on limited hours from Wednesdays through Sundays.
Given it’s about a 40-minute walk from campus, I don’t find myself on Central Street often. The street was gorgeous on the evening I visited, though, with fairy lights wrapped around each tree and charming storefronts lining the block.
Moo Joe’s decor is similarly adorable: pink and white candy-striped walls, high-top stools and a gallery wall of plastic ice cream cones. The shop gives off classic cozy parlor vibes, complete with an LED sign of a sunglass-wearing cow on the back wall.
While the decor is quaint, the shop’s prices are not. The smallest cup size runs for $4.95, while a large costs about $10. Along with cups, the shop offers its scoops in sugar cones, waffle cones and $6.95 ice cream floats.
After poring over the flavors available — and sampling a few — I opted for a scoop of the Fat Elvis in a mini cup. The Fat Elvis has a base of sweet banana ice cream rippled with peanut butter and chocolate chips, an homage to Elvis Presley’s favorite peanut butter sandwich.
I’ll admit that I’d never tasted a banana ice cream done well before, but this one hit the spot. The flavor profile was mostly vanilla with subtle hints of banana, and the peanut butter provided a savory twist to balance the sweetness of the chocolate chips. The ice cream sometimes leaned more icy than creamy, but I nonetheless savored every bite.
Along with my own scoop, I snuck a few bites of Heaps of Love from a friend. The flavor has Oreo crumbles, brownies, chunks of cookie dough, pecans, caramel and chocolate in vanilla ice cream.
This one was slightly too sweet to muster an entire scoop of, and the cookie dough chunks also crowded out most of the other flavors. While certainly ambitious, the number of mix-ins in this ice cream felt a little too gratuitous for my liking.
We also shared a mini cup of the Coconut Almond Bliss, a coconut-flavored ice cream with chocolate flakes and crispy almond pieces. As an Almond Joy fiend, I love this flavor combination. Moo Joe’s iteration did not disappoint: It was sweet and slightly crunchy, with melt-in-your-mouth morsels of chocolate throughout.
Both the Fat Elvis and the Coconut Almond Bliss, as well as a handful of other flavors, are marked gluten-free on the ice cream case. According to its website, Moo Joe’s also accommodates egg, peanut, tree-nut and soy allergies, making it a great alternative to downtown staples like Kilwin’s and Cold Stone Creamery for those with dietary restrictions.
As someone without allergies, though, the nearly two-mile trek to Moo Joe’s is slightly too long to rationalize paying an expensive visit there on an average weekday. That being said, I enjoyed nearly every bite of ice cream I had, and I loved the atmosphere of the parlor itself.
Besides, I could certainly use an excuse to drop by charming Central Street more often — though hopefully in warmer weather next time.
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