The Best Ice Cream Shops in The US - Sweet Treats For All!

We absolutely adore eating incredible ice cream, especially if it comes in off-the-wall flavors. We recently tried mango ice cream for the first time (as unbelievable as it might sound) and it’s so delicious!

If you want to get some of the best scoops in the US, then look no further than our list!

The Bent Spoon - Princeton, New Jersey

The Bent Spoon offers five-hundred-and-fifty flavors! This has earned its cult classic status among the locals, and if there’s one thing to bear in mind about traveling: always eat where the locals eat!

This amazing spot is a place where the seasonality of ingredients is the most important part of making the ice cream. At the end of the day, fresh strawberries will make better ice cream than older ones.

On top of the fresh ingredients, they make incredible mixes which are stunning examples of the benefits of flavor experimentation - think pumpkin with shiitake mushrooms!

Bi-Rite Creamery - San Francisco, California

Photo By Bi-Rite Creamery

The queue to this spot is always long, even on weekday mornings! The ice cream, quite simply, is just that good.

This is another spot in which the seasonality of an ingredient is one of the most important factors of getting it in order to make amazing ice cream, a philosophy that we adore.

A common favorite of the many choices at Bi-Rite is the cream cheese carrot cake flavor, which is just as decadent and incredible as you might think it would be!

Clementine’s Creamery - St. Louis, Missouri

Photo By Clementines Creamery

The amazing thing about this spot is the fact that the head chef brings a deep-seated love to the ice cream.

They home-make all of their different options, which is something that the founder insists upon - she grew up eating spectacular homemade ice cream since her family could afford to get it from their local parlor.

This love for great ice cream is paired with amazingly inventive cocktails, from asparagus and quinoa to their line of boozy flavors, such as Maple Bourbon, or the Manhattan.

Clumpies Ice Cream - Chattanooga, Tennessee

The founder of Clumpies, a spot that has been doing a roaring trade for an incredibly long time, was the third generation of a candy family. He decided that the future lay with frozen treats, and Clumpies was born!

The flavors are kept simple with classically wonderful flavors like butter pecan. More adventurous options are available, though, for example with Pop Rock-infused Tutti Frutti ice cream!

Your options are endless at clumpies, and you can be sure that you’ll never get tired of a flavor. The ice creams are designed with candy in mind, after all, which means that the flavors are surprisingly complex unlike a number of other ice cream spots.

FoMu - Allston, Massachusetts

FoMu prides itself on its ‘earth-inspired desserts’, which bring as much creaminess and love to vegan ice cream as possible! This vegan parlor has been open for what feels like forever, at this point, and has well and truly asserted itself as a member of the local food scene.

This spot offers non-dairy, nut-based, and coconut milk-based ice creams. You can buy each flavor by the cup, cone, sundae, or even in a frappe!

This is a spot that knows the value of great flavors coming together to create something greater than the sum of their parts - definitely check it out!

Crank & Boom Ice Cream Lounge - Lexington, Kentucky

This wonderful lounge brings a lot of delightfully unorthodox approaches to serving amazing ice cream. You can start off with a simplistically extravagant scoop or two which is topped with local strawberries and house-made marshmallows!

Then, if you find yourself with a craving for something even fancier, you can lean into the lounge vibe of the restaurant and order a boozy float - we adore the sound of a prosecco float, for example, how luxurious!

Creole Creamery - New Orleans, Louisiana

This is an amazing place which is certainly the one and only destination in the city if you’re craving dairy-based sweet treats. The atmosphere of the place is wonderfully old-school, complete with a neon sign outside and pastel pink walls inside - how delightful!

If you want something that’s definitely different from other things that you’ve tried before, go for the Creole cream cheese, which involves a slightly sweet farmhouse cheese. It’s utterly decadent, ideal for a stay in New Orleans!

Sticky Sweet - Portland, Maine

Sticky sweet is a vegan, plant-based ice cream shop - the first of its kind in the wonderful city of Portland! The ice cream is made from scratch, completely without dairy, eggs, gluten, cane sugar, refined sugars, or anything artificial whatsoever!

With a list like that, you’d be forgiven for expecting the ice cream to be sub-par, but it certainly isn’t that. The flavors change daily and are always exciting and new, plus the ice cream is precisely as smooth and wonderful as you could ever desire!

Fat Cat Creamery - Houston, Texas

This creamery is truly breathtaking. Their ice cream flavors are amazing and utterly divine to eat, making you salivate from the street!

As well as being good for your tastebuds, Fat Cat is good for the planet - all their packaging is compostable, meaning it will degrade to nothing after you throw it away.

We’d recommend the Waterloo strawberry buttermilk flavor, it’s so wonderfully tasty! It’s made of strawberry jam, buttermilk ice cream, and Waterloo Texas gin. As with all of their flavors, the ingredients are completely locally sourced.

Ferris Acres Creamery - Newtown, Connecticut

This wonderful spot is a local legend, with the family who owns and runs it tracing their origins back to 1703! They have occupied the farmstead that this creamery sits upon since 1894 - that’s history which means they know where the best spots to source local ingredients are.

The flavors that make them a local legend are utterly amazing, including a s’mores-style campfire, and PB-banana Elvis’ Dream. Just thinking about it is making us crave some ice cream right now!

Here are ice cream recipes and desserts you can have with ice cream