Best ice cream in Kyiv proves to be Italian
Sometimes, while sitting at a cafe or coffee shop in Kyiv and looking through the menu, I am really astonished by the limited selection of ice cream offered there. To lift your spirits, sometimes just a scoop of plain white ice cream topped with syrup will suffice, but when you feel like trying something unusual, like a combination of flavors, the local cafes simply can’t do the trick. Unfortunately, there still aren’t any special ice cream parlors in Kyiv that serve a wide assortment of flavors. Ukrainian and foreign ice cream franchises are most often found in shopping malls filled with noise and crowds of people – not the appropriate place to enjoy the richness and heat-quenching goodness of ice cream. I decided to find out which ice cream company in Kyiv deserves the most attention.
There are two Ukrainian brands of soft-serve ice cream, including Asorti (Assortment) and Lakomka (A Sweet Tooth), which are sold in small pavilions at the city’s busiest spots. Asorti makes one kind of low-fat ice cream, which is a tasty mixture of coffee and lemon flavors. Lakomka makes a number of different flavors, including chocolate, lemon, vanilla and strawberry, that are both fattier and sweeter than Asorti’s coffee-lemon kind. However, Lakomka outfits differ. At some you can order a pre-made chocolate/lemon or vanilla/strawberry mix squeezed from a plastic container into a waffle cone from a machine for Hr 3, at others – a softer, ice cream version (Hr 3.40 for 100 grams), served directly from an ice cream machine. The second option allows you to pick any flavor combination you want, in a cone or a paper bowl and topped with various syrups, nuts or chocolate sauce. The spots offering the latter kind of ice cream are quite popular, so you may have to stand in line for around 10 minutes to get your much desired dessert. Another place that offers soft-serve ice cream is McDonald’s, but there is very little difference in taste between each flavor, unless you add syrup.
Among the foreign franchises that offer high-quality ice cream with a wide assortment of flavors and toppings, as well as ice cream desserts, are Baskin-Robbins and La Gelateria Italiana, both of which can be found at Globus shopping mall. Baskin-Robbins claims to be a world famous ice cream franchise and its locations in Kyiv (also found at Metrograd and Karavan) now offer 31 kinds of ice cream and a short list of ready-made sundaes, cakes and milkshakes. It’s a really popular spot even with its high prices – Hr 11 for one scoop (less then 100 grams).
La Gelateria Italiana offers a bit cheaper ice cream (Hr 10 for 100 grams served in a bowl, and Hr 10 for 70 grams served in a waffle cone) of around 30 flavors. Ice cream from La Gelateria Italiana is by the same producer as the one offered at the Italian restaurant Pantagruel osteria. The main advantage of La Gelateria is that it sells authentic Italian gelato, which is considered to contain less fat than common American-style ice cream. Gelato is also softer than other ice cream and melts faster, since its ingredients are not homogenized (blended) together. At La Gelateria Italiana you can choose among flavors like chocolate, coffee, hazelnut, pistachio, strawberry, vanilla, white chocolate, lemon and even my favorite, tiramisu – after I tried it, I hardly needed more persuasion to call La Gelateria Italiana ice cream the best in Kyiv.
La Gelateria Italiana (Globus shopping center, first line)
