| rev:text
| - Mary Coyle and me go way back. Admittedly thats a common refrain you'll hear from longtime customers of one of the valley's oldest ice cream shops. But its also true for me. I've been a Mary Coyle customer since I was a teenager, and my Mom was a customer back when she was a teenager. It's no wonder that after 66 years, this place still attracts pretty much every age group and demographic imaginable. But today it was time for something new. Namely their new location on 7th Street just a block south of Bethany Home Road. My last visit was at their old location. Would this location have the same magic?
I should parse my description of Mary Coyle's old location in part because this is now the third stop for this ice cream shop. Mary Coyle herself opened her original ice cream shop back in 1951 on the corner of 15th Avenue and Thomas. Then in 1996 the shop moved to 7th Avenue just north of Missouri. This was the location I always went to growing up. The 7th Avenue location was spacious with seating for probably 100, but was more of a restaurant as they had lunch and dinner items to go with their ice cream staples. I came here a bunch of times especially during my high school days and in fact probably a dozen or so of my high school classmates worked here at one point. And of course I came here often with my family where would we usually tackle one of their giant family sized ice cream monstrosities. We took on both the Hill and the Mountain, but never the Grand Canyon (read the menu for the full descriptions of these, and yes they're as insane as they sound).
The new location by contrast has seating for maybe 30. Gone are the lunch and dinner menu items. Instead its all about the ice cream, the thing that made Mary Coyle a treasured name in the valley. Much of menu looks familiar from the sundaes to the banana splits and even those giant family size ice cream items I just mentioned. One menu column I didn't recognize was the Showboats. Perhaps I missed that menu column during my past visits, but the bowls sounded positively divine when I read over them. So on a Sunday, I came in for a Sundae, but opted for a Showboat instead. One in particular. The Cookie Man. Cookies and cream ice cream, chocolate sauce, crushed Cookies, marshmallows, whipped cream, and a cherry. Yup, we have a winner. Total for a regular sized Cookie Man including tax came to just under $10.
Alright, let's talk about "regular sized" for a moment. There are actually two sizes for these bowls. Pippen and Regular. Somehow in my mind I thought I remembered the Pippen size being pretty small based on the desserts I'd had here in the past. Thus I opted for a Regular size just to be sure. The odd look I got from the gal at the register probably should've tipped me off to what was being sent to my table. Folks, the Regular size bowl is massive. So massive that as soon as it was put on my table, little kids were staring at me with amazement and adults were laughing as if to say 'have fun with that, you idiot'. These regular sized bowls are definitely meant to be shared by at least two (probably closer to 4), so you can imagine my horror at this point.
Out of sheer stubbornness I tackled it anyway. And the good news is this was an ice cream concoction definitely worth the effort. The flavors are fantastic (particularly the crushed cookie pieces and marshmallow). There were probably 10 scoops of ice cream in this thing, but they apportioned the toppings out very nicely. Believe it or not, I actually did finish it (to the astonishment of people sitting next to me), but I'm honestly kind of ashamed that I did. That was seriously a lot of dairy and I've probably ruined dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow morning. But if its my last meal for 12 hours, boy what a last meal.
Props to the owners of Mary Coyle for resurrecting this Phoenix institution and bringing it back to its roots. The location may be new, the setup may be smaller, but the great old school ice cream creations that made Mary Coyle famous are still going strong. Now if you'll excuse me I need to nap off this epic dairy coma.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)