I had COWS Ice Cream earlier. I was really excited about it because the couple of times I passed by the shop, it had this long line of customers; also, it was really easy to spot someone holding a COWS Ice Cream around town. According to Maryam, Banff is famous for COWS. Or is it that COWS is famous in Banff? Whatever it is, some COWS for me it is!
Dinner/Dessert:
COWS Ice Cream, Single Cone
Flavor: Cowberry
I sampled two other flavors: Don Cherry and Mint Chocolate Chip. Those were good and flavourful; of course I would have ended up choosing Cowberry, which frankly is just bland and underwhelming. The berries in it are kind of frozen as well - and frozen fruit is my least favourite thing in the world.
Why did I choose Cowberry? It's only because the berries were "from Prince Edward island". and I thought, I can get Cherry and Mint Chocolate Chip anywhere in the world; but one does not get Prince Edward Island berries everyday.
So much for local flavour, eh? It was so bland it actually tasted like sorbet gone cheap.
On second thought; it might actually be sorbet or some form of froyo, mistaken by me as ice cream. In that case, minus further five points from COWS for doing such a bad job with their menu. Their menu was actually kind of hard to navigate and unintuitive; how more ambiguous can you get with "Single Cone", "Double Cone"? While "Single Cone" is passably understandable (okay... single scoop on single cone...), what on earth exactly is a "Double Cone" ... for all we know it can be two cones on ice cream, you know? (Now wouldn't that be funny...)
They have a board of "Today's Flavours" up; however no distinction whatsoever between the sorbets and real ice creams. I'm fairly sure that they have frozen yogurt in the mix, it's just that we wouldn't be able to tell that by the flavour name.
Also I think it's fair to expect to learn right off the bat, from any world-famous ice cream parlour's menu, how many scoops and flavours one can get with one serving. But no, I had to ask!
I'm fine about asking; but dear God, the answer didn't please >.< It's really about 4 CAD per scoop per cone, per flavour... That's pretty expensive...
Anyway, COWS may be Banff or Canadian famous, but it's nowhere competitive enough for the ones we have in New England - yep, not even the Ben & Jerry's food court stalls haha. It's such a given among New England ice cream vendors to distinguish between ice cream, gelato, yogurt, sorbet - which I think is important to show a sort of expertise in the dessert making process.
Also, while it may seem that COWS had a wide array of flavours for us to choose from, they were really all just about the same: same old chocolate peanut butter chips fudge candy pieces caramel etc... it's like COWS mixed the same ingredients differently and called it a different flavour.
Whereas New England ice creamers are hardcore about churning out new, exciting flavours by the month. Hemp, watermelon, cucumber... you name it!
Finally - New England ice creams sell so much cheaper, for more scoops, with better flavour choices, with fancier cones.
New England ice cream culture for the win! COWS got nothing on them.
However, COWS are good at one thing - making a brand for themselves. Half of the shop is for selling COWS merchandise and tees - which I admit are pretty fun to look at :) They pretty much exhausted the world's supply of pop culture references.
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