only in ny #2: van leeuwen

snack: giandujia chocolate ice cream
drink: hot chocolate

as a child, i loved ice cream. i grew up in a household where we sat down to dinner almost every night & at the end, if we'd finished everything on our plate, we'd get dessert. 90% of the time, that dessert was ice cream. even nowadays, when i go back home to visit, there are two or three cartons of ice cream in the fridge & my parents still have a bowl of ice cream after almost every dinner. personally, i haven't kept the same enthusiasm for ice cream & lately, i've only had it a couple times a year tops. it's a great treat & all, but it's cold & at some point in adulthood, i chose to embrace my lifelong hatred of the cold & i guess ice cream sort of got pushed to the side.

there's a lot of good ice cream here in nyc & since food trucks are all the rage these days, there are a few gourmet ice cream trucks around, including the van leeuwen ice cream truck, which serves artisan ice cream. although i've talked about nyc's food trucks quite a bit, the closest i've ever come to eating from one was when i went to check out the new wafels & dinges truck, took a photo of it & opted against waiting in the long line that had already formed. as such, i hadn't tried out van leeuwen's ice cream, but then a month or so back they opened up their first physical location in greenpoint. as much as i'm meh on ice cream, the fact that they'd expanded to a physical locale intrigued me, so on a recent night after work, i fled times sq & made my way over to greenpoint to meet up with the bro & head over to van leeuwen for some cold cold ice cream.

my bro decided to bring harriet the hound dog along for the walk, so instead of sitting down & eating, i ran in to grab something while they waited outside. it's a cute, relatively small space with a few tables, a counter & a back kitchen area that on that night appeared to have 20-30 people in it making ice cream. seriously, it seemed like a freakin' clown car back there. as i stood waiting for my order, i observed a guy & girl sitting at the table closest to the counter. they were speaking in what i think was german so i can't be exactly sure what was going on, but they were sitting around a laptop & in the scenario i made up in my head, the guy was showing the girl his new music video. she watched intently for a few minutes & didn't laugh in his face, so i guess it was pretty good.

for my eats, i ordered a small bowl of their giandujia chocolate ice cream, which is made with michel cluizel chocolate blended with piedmont hazelnuts. totally artisan. michel cluizel is this french dude who's been making chocolate since his parents expanded their pastry business & started making chocolate way back in 1948. that's like a long time ago. i was but a glimmer in my parents' parents' eyes back then. anyway, apparently he's pretty well known & has a store here in manhattan. it's in rockefeller center though & i avoid that area like the plague, so until i visited van leeuwen, i'd never even heard of him.

as for the ice cream made with his fancy chocolate, it's smooth, natural-tasting stuff. you can taste the hazelnuts, but like with nutella, the chocolate's the dominant flavor & the hazelnut provides a nice complement. if you're not a weird ice cream-phobic type like me, it's worth checking out, especially once the cold weather decides to finally give it a rest. bonus: i carried it back to my bro's apartment & it didn't melt one bit. sure it was only in the high-50s out, but the i see the fact that it wasn't a soupy mess by the time i ate it as a sign of quality.

since i love extremes more than words (& extreme's "more than words"...new live cd/dvd out may 5th!), i ordered a cup of hot chocolate along with my ice cream. it's also made with michel cluizel chocolate (72% chocolate, to be exact) & at $4, it's a pricey hot cocoa, but it's well worth it. i definitely enjoyed it more than the ice cream. it came with a big ass dollop of chocolate in it & when the van leeuwen dude gave it to me, he also handed me a spoon & said "you're gonna want to stir that up"...so i did...& it was good...& there was much rejoicing. in fact, i rejoiced all the way to the bottom of the cup, where i found a special treat waiting for me: a pool of leftover liquid chocolate...& i drank it...& it was good...but the rejoicing was no more. i was out of chocolate.

van leeuwen, 632 manhattan ave, brooklyn, 718-701-1630