Sunday, July 19 is National Ice Cream Day, a holiday Ronald Reagan put on the books in 1984 and one of the few proclamations everyone has managed to agree on since. In a Dallas July, it barely needs the excuse. What it needs is a plan.
So here is one: fourteen scoop shops worth your Sunday, split between the places that have been doing this for decades and the newcomers proving the craft still has somewhere to go. A moment of silence first for Wild About Harry’s, which served its last frozen custard on Knox in 2021 after 25 years and never found a new home. The metroplex is poorer for it. These fourteen carry the torch.
The Old Guard
Beth Marie’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream has anchored the Denton Square since 1998, churning on a machine designed in 1927 while the college kids and the courthouse crowd line up together. The board runs past 100 flavors, but the move is a scoop of Turtle Torture or pralines and cream in a housemade waffle cone, followed by whatever an egg cream or a phosphate soda is, because this is one of the last places in North Texas that will show you. 117 W. Hickory St., Denton. (940) 384-1818.
Henry’s Homemade Ice Cream has been making its ice cream in-house in Plano for decades, through generations of birthday parties and at least one near-death experience the neighborhood refused to accept. The spumoni, loaded with pistachios and cherries, and the pecan praline in a chocolate-dipped cone are the orders. 3100 Independence Pkwy., Plano. (972) 943-3639.
Sweet Firefly has been the reward at the end of a Canyon Creek evening since 2011, a Richardson shop that also deals in handmade toffee, New Orleans-style SnoBalls, and bulk candy. Regulars drive in from three suburbs for the sea salt caramel, the coffee toffee crunch, and the bourbon vanilla. Closed Mondays. 2701 Custer Pkwy., Suite 810, Richardson. (972) 635-5635.
Melt Ice Creams started on Fort Worth’s Magnolia Avenue in 2014 under Kari Crowe-Seher and has grown to six locations across Fort Worth and Dallas, including the Stockyards’ Mule Alley and Dallas’s Bishop Arts, without losing the small-batch touch. The Salt Lick, all butter and salted caramel, and the Cup of Texas, made with coffee from Cowtown’s Novel Coffee Roasters, are the signatures. 1201 W. Magnolia Ave., Fort Worth, and 405 N. Bishop Ave., Dallas.
Howdy Homemade Ice Cream gave the world Dr Pepper Chocolate Chip, which would be reason enough to visit. The better reason is the crew behind the counter: the Dallas original built its business around employing people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and a decade on, the model has spread to shops across the country. 12300 Inwood Rd., Suite 200, Dallas. (214) 484-1552.
Botolino Gelato Artigianale is Carlo Gattini’s love letter to the gelato he learned in his grandmother’s shop in Italy, translated into what he calls Italo Texano. The recipe book holds more than 70 flavors, but only 16 make the case on any given day. Trust the hazelnut, the mascarpone and figs, and the dark chocolate sorbet. The Lowest Greenville original has siblings in Bishop Arts, Preston Hollow, and Plano. 2116 Greenville Ave., Dallas. (469) 776-9077.
Milk & Cream has been stuffing scoops into warm glazed donuts on Lowest Greenville since 2016, and a decade later the line out the door on summer nights says the gimmick was never a gimmick. The Cookie Monster in a donut remains the photo, but the honey lavender and banana pudding are the flavors that bring people back. 1929 Greenville Ave., Dallas. (214) 434-1739.
The New Class
Salt & Straw finally crossed the Texas line this spring, landing its first two locations in the state on Henderson Avenue in Dallas and Magnolia Avenue in Fort Worth. The Portland company built its name on flavors that sound like dares and eat like ideas, and the Texas-exclusive cream cheese jalapeño jelly is exactly that. Metal tasting spoons, patient scoopers, try everything. 2323 N. Henderson Ave., Dallas, and 1305 W. Magnolia Ave., Fort Worth.
The Spelled Milk in Bishop Arts makes its ice cream fresh daily and rotates flavors weekly, then surrounds the whole operation with a wall of childhood cereals, board games, and a working Pac-Man machine. It keeps late hours, which makes it the rare scoop shop that works as the end of a night out. Closed Sundays and Mondays, so go Saturday and call it an early celebration. 712 W. Davis St., Dallas. (214) 484-3714.
Sugar Pine Creamery in Plano may be the most quietly adventurous soft serve in the region. Owner Lilis Pramasurja runs just six flavors at a time, two always dairy-free, and changes the board every two weeks: tomato strawberry, yuzu mango, popcorn, and Jus Alpukat, her soft-serve answer to the Indonesian avocado drink. 6832 Coit Rd., Suite 270B, Plano.
Churn and Bake brings genuine patience to its Asian-inspired flavors. The tea in the jasmine green tea steeps for 48 hours, the brownies in the chocolate brownie batter come out of the shop’s own oven, and the lychee almond sorbet earns its following. The brown sugar boba tea is the sleeper. 2707 W. 15th St., Suite C, Plano. (469) 277-6098.
Swirled Peace rounds out the list for everyone the other eleven leave behind. Sara Saginaw’s Bishop Arts shop is entirely plant-based, built on oat-milk soft serve with every allergen listed on the board, and the frozen hot chocolate and matcha stand up to any dairy in town. 309 W. Eighth St., Dallas.
Local Creamery in Plano has quietly become the shop other ice cream people talk about, thanks to genuinely good dairy-free and gluten-free scoops sitting right alongside the classics. The Texas Bluebonnet and the banana pudding are the ones locals name first, and the gluten-free waffle cones are the real thing, not an afterthought. 5805 Preston Rd., Suite 598, Plano. (469) 468-3768.
Milkytreats takes the cereal-milk idea and pushes it further than most, soft-serving flavors like black velvet alongside scoop flavors dressed in actual Fruity Pebbles. It is exactly the kind of shop that rewards ordering something you would not pick anywhere else. 7000 Independence Pkwy., Suite 104D, Plano. (214) 718-6652.
Fourteen shops, two counties, one Sunday. The forecast says triple digits. You know what to do.
