Off-Topic: Some Ice Cream Places

During this year’s vacation trips, we sampled an unusual number of ice cream places around Sweden & Europe. Here are some notes on a few places we visited and where I took the time to actually take some photographs…

Excellent – Kremet

We took a guided tour in Cagliari, Sardinia, which ended with some free time to explore the town. However, it was so warm that all you really wanted to was to grab an ice cream.  Most of the tour group immediately went for the closest ice cream place, but luckily we went a couple of shops up the street to the Kremet Gelateria.

This place was excellent! The ice cream was fantastic, and they had a good selection of milk-free sorbets on offer. The service was good, the menus clear, and it was not a problem to communicate in English with staff.  They had a “Kremet Lab” behind glass walls at the back of the shop where you could seem them make the ice cream, and the whole aesthetic was one of lab-like cleanliness and sparse decoration. Highly recommended!

Style – Hedera

A few days later while walking in Rome, we stumbled on the nice pedestrian area of Via dei Coronari. This street was not over crowded like the areas closer to the big attractions like the Vatican and Colosseum, and it featured some shops that felt more like high-quality boutiques (hand-made leather shoes, jewellery, etc.) than the usual tourist traps you found in many other places.  I got a coffee from a coffee shop whose name I do not recall, but it was among the best I ever had.

On the Via dei Coronari we found Hedera, an up-scale ice cream place. The place was very stylish and fit in well with the boutiques around it.

The man running the place was very welcoming and had a fair selection of ice cream variants – not as rich a selection as Kremet, though. There was a daily “surprise” ice cream that I tried but cannot quite figure out what it tasted like. Maybe there was a hint of liquorice?  Better photos as are available on their own website.

High-quality – Kling

Kling in Mariestad is an ice cream manufacturer that also run their own ice cream outlet (Klings Glasskiosk) in the main square of the little town of Mariestad. They make typical Swedish-style ice cream (harder than the Italian style) with really nice texture and flavour. They offer several types of milk-free sorbets, and the kids loved them. They also have home-made soft ice, but that was not particularly impressive.

Mariestad is a good place to stop for food & refreshments along the E20 to and from Göteborg, and Klings Glasskiosk is a really good ice cream choice.

Good soft ice but nothing else – Slagsta

Slagsta Glass (Glass is ice cream in Swedish) in Eskilstuna(google maps location) is known for its home-made soft ice. Unfortunately, they pair it up with standard ice cream from GB Glace, which is totally un-exciting. It also implies that they have a single milk-free sorbet on the menu. Still, the soft ice cream is really good and rich, and we liked it much better than Klings. Slagsta makes their own wafer cups as well, which are also superb.

They combine ice cream with candy, fruits, and cream in nice ways, but the prices are rather on the high side. 59 SEK (Approx 6 Euros) for a wafer cup with soft ice, cream, and some candies sprinkled over it is not very good value for money. The results are delicious, but it is not worth going out of your way to get here. If they would ditch the cheap GB glace for a more up-market ice cream manufacturer, it could be really good.