Corner Piece

Holy Cow Ice Cream Café (first visit)

Holy Cow Ice Cream Café is literally the first thing off of the route 114 south exit from 128, in Peabody. It's a compact but efficient space, with four serving windows, and a surprising amount of parking1 while also having a bunch of picnic tables. If you're at the Northshore Mall, you can get here using the underpass over by Nordstroms without having to get on 114 or 128 directly. (Seriously, skip dessert at the Cheesecake Factory and come here instead.)

Holy Cow opened in 2021 and by 2022 had won awards for some of their unique ice creams, "Rityz AF" (with Ritz Cracker Toffee and cracker bits mixed in) in particular; they "took that personally" and now only have a special flavor menu - and recommend snapping a picture of the flavor wall to read while on line.2

While Holy Cow is only a couple of years old, it preserves a marker stone3 for Chandler’s Ice Cream, which was open from 1934-2003 - closed by fire - and then from 2009-2013. DownRiver Ice Cream had a branch here in this location for a few years as well (DownRiver is still open in Essex.)4

First Visit

The menu is very broad, though not the longest list I've seen - they've definitely chosen to go with Interesting over Everything - and yet, they've still managed to include Chocolate, Vanilla, and Strawberry. I went with "Corner Piece" - crispy brownie corner pieces in a very rich chocolate ice cream - combined with "Boston Blackout" - black cocoa layer cake in a black cocoa ice cream. Boston Blackout was overwhelmingly chocolate - imagine a really nice chocolate swirl except that's actually the entire ice cream - which is "what it said on the tin"! It's a very "no we're not kidding" chocolate - in the Bring A Tent sense. Corner Piece is on the high end of "chocolate with stuff in it" flavors; Boston Blackout gives a serious challenge to Tosci's "Dark Chocolate No. 3".

I was there with a friend who enjoyed the "Pistachio Baklava" flavor; the crunch from the baklava itself was interesting, on top of having pistachio chunks in the ice cream. (See also The Creamery for their Baklava Sundae; I heartily endorse this trend of colliding baklava with ice cream.) My friend also pointed out that many of the flavors involved butter in some form; this place is on the upper end of the scale for really rich flavors.

For future visits I think I'll start with "Mintsanity" or "Brown Butter Cornbread", with "Cinnamon Churro Dough" and "Rocky Neck Road"6. You could also pick through the flavors that they've specificially gotten awards for, as marked on the menu: "Ritzy AF", "Eazy Peazy" (lemon curd+lemon bar), and "Jackpot" (butterscotch+biscotti.) For that matter, their Vanilla, Chocolate, and Strawberry all indicate NAICA award status, and it's good to see them taking the classics seriously.

Alternatively, they have an "Old Fashioned" Ice Cream Cookie Sandwich that apparently dominated a boston.com survey (2022-07-21, public) with 50% of the vote - the article points out that they also have (or had, in 2022) "the Smorewich, a riff on the classic campfire dessert".

Decoration

Usually I just mention that a place has picnic tables, and maybe include pictures if they overlook a farm with cows but Holy Cow has put some real effort into the setting. Since they're tucked into a corner of a busy intersection, having Jersey Barriers around the picnic area is just basic safety - but they've decorated them extensively in cow art in their blue and black theme colors as well. Also, they've covered the concrete slab with artificial turf, which as at least an attempt at getting the "countryside ice cream shop" feel even when you know route 128 is a block away.

They've also got something halfway between a mural and a climbing wall on two sides of the building; traffic cones repainted as splattered ice cream cones are straightforward, and the sculpted ice cream cookie sandwiches are absurdly large - if they were lower down they'd probably get used as seating.

(As a photographer, I also want to point out that it was convenient that the artwork was thorougly lit up - all of the art shots are from after sunset, if anything the shadows help show the 3d aspects of the sculptures.)

  1. Heading south, get off 114 immediately into the "first" parking lot; if you get to the traffic light you're too late, that's the exit, there's only one lane going behind the building to get over to that part. ↩

  2. There are laminated menu copies at the serving windows, which suggests that they don't vary that rapidly, and some of the options like "Loaded PSL" are clearly seasonal - but I appreciate the commitment to the bit. ↩

  3. The original building was red brick which shows up in a few news articles; the brick and the marker have been painted white for the current version, but the building on that spot really does go back to the 1930's. ↩

  4. According to local news sites5, it was even used briefly by a manufacturer of home grow-op equipment - same business as Grove Labs and probably just as transitory. ↩

  5. Credit to Salem News for some of the background story, specifically Holy Cow coming to Peabody at former Chandler's 2021-03-23, paywalled; Here's the scoop: Holy Cow wins national contest 2022-11-22, paywalled; further credit to The Patch, Back In The Family 2011-07-27, public, for more about Chandler's reopening. ↩

  6. Rocky Neck is a historical district in the middle of the Gloucester Inner Harbor, not far from the original Holy Cow location. See also Pizzi Farm's "Hardy Pond Mudd" or Tosci's "Roxbury Puddingstone" for further examples of the tradition of local geography ice cream pun names. ↩

Towns: Peabody Gloucester
Novelties: Ice Cream Cookie Sandwich
Flavors: Boston Blackout Corner Piece Pistachio Baklava