toscanini's

Yesterday on our way to Kendall Square Cinema to see Tree of Life, we stopped at Toscanini's for ice cream, and it's some of the best I've had.

The ice cream to beat is Jeni's, from Ohio - they make the two best ice creams I've had: their sweet corn/black raspberry ice cream and lime cardamom frozen yogurt (with rhubarb jam in early summer).

We each had two scoops, and two of the flavors were the equal of Jeni's: lemon espresso, and grapefruit. The grapefruit, like the blackberry-lime (Caitlin's other scoop), was an ice cream, not a sorbet. I've had grapefruit sorbet before, and it can be amazing - but grapefruit ice cream was a whole nother thing. The bitterness came through, but it was rich and creamy instead of tart like sorbet. I'm not sure how much rind was involved - must have been a nontrivial amount, to bring so much grapefruit flavor to the table. The blackberry-lime was good, and had noticeable amounts of lime flavor - in the end, it was just outshone by the other flavors.

The lemon espresso was one of two I ordered, along with Earl Grey. I'd ordered Earl Grey because I'd had it several times in Denver almost exactly 18 years ago, and not since - so it was weird and cool having such a distinctive flavor and such a feeling of nostalgia.

But the lemon espresso ... wow. I ordered it largely because I wasn't sure what it would be, how exactly those two flavors would be combined. It turned out to be a bittersweet coffee ice cream - the bitterness came through more effectively than in any coffee ice cream I've had, making it a much more well-rounded coffee ice cream - infused with lemon essence, so that there's a strong lemon aftertaste. So fucking good.