Ices Queen, Brooklyn

Brad MarcusBrooklyn Dessert

After a great Chinese food dinner on Flatbush Avenue, my daughter wanted to get dessert at Ices Queen. Now, I’ve been taking her there pretty much her whole life. I started coming to Ices Queen as a teenager when they opened in 1978. To share that with her and her girlfriend is a special thing. The neighborhood has never been wonderful. Ice Queen is on the end of a block on Utica Avenue full of car detail and body shops, just off Kings Highway. After dark, the neighborhood can be extremely sketchy. But on a warm summer evening, it’s perfection. We parked in the lot across the street; thank you, McDonald’s, and headed over. Surveying the list of flavors, sadly missing my favorite banana ices, but still pretty serious for an ices place, I ordered a large rainbow ice, diet be damned, and she ordered the vanilla chip. They were $4 each and much bigger than I should have ordered, but what the hell, you only live once. Just as good as I remember. The staff were very friendly. The manager told me that they had just bought the place 3 years earlier.

What to Order

Well, the name says it all, ICES. They do have a selection of ice cream, but really, you can get ice cream a lot of places. This place has been serving Italian ices since 1978 and on summer evenings, the cars can be double-parked halfway down Utica Avenue.

Good to know before you go

Hours: Monday – Thursday 11am – 6:30pm, Friday-Saturday 10am – 8pm ans Sunday 10am – 7pm
The Wait: Depends on the weather. Hot days, you could wait 10-15 minutes. As the weather cools, the lines shorten.

As with DiFara, which I recently posted about, having some ices at Ices Queen brought me back to the summers of my youth. I’ve eaten at many dessert places over time, but this one still has something special. Maybe it’s my decades long connection, maybe it’s the superior ices, maybe I’m just getting old and misty, or all of the above mixed together. Kinda like my rainbow ices.