Sweet dreams can come true
THIS summer, pastry chef Danielle Keene is hosting a new Ice Cream Shoppe on Tuesday nights at Wilshire Restaurant in Santa Monica. She’s an ice cream lover through and through and relishes memories of ice cream nights with her family when she was growing up. This once-a-week event is a tribute to childhood nostalgia, but she also brings all her newfound pastry skills to her ice cream creations.
Drop on by for something as simple as a scoop of her latest flavor, which on a recent night was vanilla saffron -- it combines the Indian taste for saffron ice cream with a generous dose of vanilla.
I brought a friend who is something of an ice cream fiend and got almost giddy with the prospect of an entire ice cream menu. It didn’t take her long to choose. Once she read “four cone sampler” on the menu, she claimed dibs on that one. And when the waiter set down a metal holder that rotates the four waffle cones -- the better to lick or scoop, my dear -- she had to giggle. She readied her spoon and dipped into the first flavor: rocky road gelato studded with house-made marshmallows. Pretty good. Then came my favorite, honeycomb ice cream, followed by a milk chocolate chai and a pretty fresh nectarine sorbet.
Meanwhile, I was attacking the towering Black Forest sundae. The bottom layer is an individual warm chocolate cake with a fudge frosting topped with sour cherry ice cream and a river of hot fudge, crowned with a gooey almond marshmallow. Fresh cherries are strewn around to lovely effect. But in the end, the flavors all run together. Maybe it’s just too baroque.
The banana split, though, should set ice cream aficionados’ hearts racing. It’s a big one, replete with three kinds of ice cream -- vanilla, candied ginger and strawberry settled among an avalanche of fresh fruit. It’s that season, so we’ve got nectarines, strawberries and even a little caramelized banana in there, and a drizzling of various sauces -- and, of course, a cherry, a fresh one, to finish it off. There’s a banana ice cream pie too, sporting a tall layer of soft, swirled meringue. You can get a milkshake made with two kinds of ice cream, banana and malted milk. Or a traditional root beer float made with Virgil’s root beer and chocolate chip ice cream.
This is just a sampling, though. Keene delves into her memory and imagination and comes up with new variations on a theme pretty much every week.
As we sit in Wilshire’s two-level garden on this early summer night, it’s delicious eating cold ice cream with the heat lamps turned up for those of us who forgot a sweater. At the far end of the garden, candles dance in the breeze. And overhead, white sails keep the dampness at bay.
The bottom of the menu of ice cream extravaganzas, every one made in-house with organic dairy products and fruits from the farmers’ market, reads “Danielle Keene, pastry chef and soda jerk.” Not a bad title at all. Especially because this pastry chef is like a kid let loose in, well, an ice cream shop.
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Wilshire Restaurant
Where: 2454 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica
When: 6 to 10 p.m. Tuesdays
Price: Ice cream items, $3 to $12. Full bar. Valet parking.
Info: (310) 586-1707, wilshirerestaurant.com