FROZEN HOAGIES SWEET SHOP
in Somerville, MA
This is a place i've been dying to get to since I heard about it. I mean, they make their own ice-cream cookie sandwiches! Amongst my memories of high school, the ones that haven't been necessarily repressed, are Chip-whiches. Two soft chocolate chip cookies clamped down on either side of a vanilla ice cream patty. This was my treat of choice quite often. I've had decent ones at restaurants in the years since, but a place where that's their SPECIALITY? We'll see.
So the deal is: you choose your cookies, and you choose your 2 scoops of ice cream, and they slap it all together for you. They had about 5 or 6 cookies on hand to choose from (not as impressive as the over-all list on the website). No matter, I want to keep it relatively traditional for the first go.
I decided on a chocolate chip cookie and a brownie cookie. Next best thing to a chip-wich is a brownie sunday, no way could this turn out bad. For ice cream I went with vanilla, to keep it old school (and because it's commonly present in a chipwich/brownie sunday), and espresso (to kick it up a notch).
First impressions: difficult to eat like a normal ice cream sandwich, better off with a spoon. It may only be two scoops. but they're definitely plenty. The ice cream was not soft serve, but had a smooth, near-waxyness to it that resembled soft-serve ice cream, but it was very thick. The ice cream wasn't bad, but kinda bland (much the same as soft-serve can be). I didn't enjoy it more than Ben and Jerry's, that's for sure. The cookies, also disappointing. If you're going to sell brownie cookies, take a cue from Pepperidge Farm and make them soft. The brownie cookie was like cocoa bark that I chiseled away bit by bit with my spoon.
Eventually I put the chocolate chip cookie aside, and went open faced on this thing. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it, but I was pretty let down. This was not the new treat spot I will be frequenting. Dry cookies, bland ice cream... it all missed the mark some how.
I will admit the chocolate chip cookie (which I saved to eat last) was pretty good. It was much softer than the brownie cookie, and had a good taste. However, it still had that left on a kitchen table on a humid day sort of outer crunch. That's a false crunch and ruins the cookie experience. I'm not going to say I'll never return to Frozen Hoagies, but i'm not going to go out of my way for it. Not when 7-11 still has Chip-wiches.
Review by Dave James, who lives in Boston as a graphic designer, podcaster, and lover.
RECORD SCRATCH SOUND EFFECT! Our man Pat also had this to add:
Excellent stuff Dave! By coincidence, I was out at a craft fair in
Brookline recently checking out the food truck offerings when I chanced
upon the Frozen Hoagies food truck. I didn't have much room because of
the other 2 trucks I tried (reviews of these coming soon!), so I had to
keep it light with a one cookie, one scoop dish. Otherwise, my gut
surely would've become the womb some kind of cheeseburger, shawarma, ice
cream abomination that I'd be helpless to stop from eating me and all
the happy fairgoers in attendance.
A
snickerdoodle cookie and a scoop of salted caramel ice cream were a
natural pairing, and in my mind it should've been an easy A. However,
the cookie independently was hardly impressive; in fact, I'd wager you
could get one at your local grocery of equal quality. It was soft, it
tasted like a snickerdoodle, but nothing really special about it.
Unfortunately, the ice cream was a slight let-down as well. My standards
for ice cream are quite high, because usually when I indulge myself in
the frozen treat, it's a pint of B&J's. But this ice cream, while
tasting of caramel, seemed otherwise quite plain. The texture was
slightly off as well- more goopy and clay-like than I was expecting. I
crumbled the cookie within the dish and found mild satisfaction with the
concoction.
Both the cookie and the ice cream
could be improved with some chunks- chocolate, toffee, or butterscotch
chips would go a long way. But as it stands, I'll have to stick this
Frozen Hoagies combination with a C+, which in this scenario certainly
does not stand for "Creative", something I'd love to see more of from
Frozen Hoagies in the future. Break some ground with the ice cream
sandwiches, do something wild! Come up with some signature offerings,
don't make us do all the work!
Upon a glance of
Frozen Hoagies' website, I haven't given up hope for them, as I found a
few things that sounded incredible in an unlikely food arena-
breakfast. Apparently, the brick and mortar store serves breakfast Saturday
and Sundays from 8-1. Some note worthy ingredients listed are: pork
carnitas, sriracha aioli, brown sugar bacon, farmers cheese. If this
spirit of innovation carried over into an ice cream sandwich menu,
Frozen Hoagies would be absolutely killing it.
-sl33zy
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