Ice Cream Bar Restaurant Review

Ice Cream Bar Restaurant Review written by Culinary Guide, Emily Drevets

Ice Cream Bar is a treat of a place. With everything from hand-made sodas to house-made root beer and ice cream cones, each menu item impresses with dedication to detail, authenticity, quality.

The Place: Take your pick from sitting at the old-fashioned soda fountain (which really is from the 1930s), huddling at the ice cream counter, or snagging a seat outside. With floor-to-ceiling art deco decor, you’ll wish you were bringing someone here for a pre-prom date.

The Food and the Drink: The attention to detail at Ice Cream Bar boggles the mind. I tasted the Orange-Sicle soda (with real cream), the Cappelletis Remedy (an adult beverage), the brioche grilled cheese sandwich with crème fraîche, the tuna melt with fontina cheese, and the banana split (described in detail below), and without exception, I feel I could dedicate an entire article to any one of those items simply because they were each outstanding in their own way.

But let’s talk more about the banana split whose vanilla, milk chocolate, and morello cherry ice creams made me feel like I’d never tasted ice cream before. On top of it were house-made sauces, the rich chocolate, the buttery caramel, and the tart cherry, which packed in so much flavor I wished I could swim in them. Then there was the banana holding everything together like a mother’s arms, and as my spoon crunched through its caramelized coating and I scooped up that perfect bite of slightly-melted vanilla ice cream all mixed with the chocolate and caramel sauces, it occurred to me that I was eating the Platonic ideal of an banana split, the ultimate standard of all banana-splitdom.

When the dessert was brought out, I modestly said that there was no way my friend and I wouldn’t be able to eat it all, but I was very wrong about that. Very wrong.

Menu Must-Do: Get the grilled cheese sandwich. I think I’ll always remember the buttery flakiness of the brioche. (Also, obviously, get the banana split.)

The Details:

Ice Cream Bar (Cole Valley)
Open Sun – Thurs, 12:00 pm- 10:00pm
Open Fri – Sat, 12:00 – 11:00pm

(415) 742-4932

815 Cole St. (@ Carl St.)
San Francisco, CA 94117