The Vittles London Ice Cream Guide 2024
The Vittles London Ice Cream Guide 2024
The 20 best ice creams in London. Words by Ruby Tandoh. Photos by Michaël Protin and Ruby Tandoh; graphics by Dan Biddulph.
Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today, we’re releasing Ruby Tandoh’s fully updated guide to the best ice cream guide in London. To read Ruby’s project on London ice cream – Beyond Gelato, from 2023 – please click here.
There is a map of all 20 ice creams mentioned in this guide, plus notes on 135 places that didn’t quite make it, at the end of this newsletter. We have also made easy to use maps for last month’s sandwich guide and bakery guide, which you can find here and here. All the maps are available to subscribers for £5/month or £45/year.
The Vittles London Ice Cream Guide 2024, by Ruby Tandoh
London is not, on the surface of things, an ice cream city. On a ramble through Soho, you will be confronted with the best examples of our worst ice cream tendencies: nominally Italian ice cream heaped in gusty peaks; bad gelato garnished with Raffaello; good ice creams, nefariously funded; lazy novelties; seatless parlours; Biscoff. Still, we do have a fragmented – and often incongruous – scene. In the middle of Park Royal is a café where you can get a long fang of baklava sandwiched with Syrian booza. In the north of the city, there’s saffron ice cream with shards of clotted cream and pistachio, stuffed between two wafer moons. In the east and west, you can find tall towers of mango or sheeryakh soft serve. Some of these businesses are part-time, a side hustle, WFH, self-taught or opportunistic, and call to mind London’s original ice cream vendors: nineteenth-century Italian migrants who sold milk ices itinerantly, on the streets and with an entrepreneurial zeal. They’re a reminder that ice cream can, and even should, be a dissident art.
In the year since I first wrote this guide, ice cream in London has not unrecognisably changed. There is no emerging scene of artisan kulfi makers, bingsu hyperspecialists and businesses making dondurma with the same care that we’ve come to expect from our bakeries. There are, however, a few places where the scene has leaned into its most single-minded, occasionally silly, and therefore best, ice cream impulses. The soft-servification of London has been coming for a while, the consequence of soft-serve machines entering the non-specialist arena in the same way slushie machines did in the early 2000s. The latest iteration has its centre of gravity in Ilford, where a mango soft serve has made Hafiz Juice Corner – a steady and fiercely local juice and kulfi vendor – into a city-wide name, at least among followers of the halal food scene. Across the city in Harrow, Baharistan is making skyscraper cones of mango and sheeryakh-accented soft serve. The fact that they call the latter vanilla – even though it does not taste of vanilla but of cardamom and milk – shows you the existential complexities of the idea of ‘plainness’.
Japanese cafés are also going above and beyond, with a number of them making unnecessarily good ice cream, in small spaces, for absolutely no good reason besides pride in the product itself. You can – and many places do – just buy a cheap freezer cabinet and a starter palette of Marshfield Farm or the now inescapable Hackney Gelato if you want to make a quick summer buck. You do not need to make little orbs of vegan strawberry ice or scoop grassy, homemade matcha ice cream into a little ceramic bowl, or churn red bean paste with cream and sugar, but these cafés do.
For the 2024 version of this guide, I visited each of the original top 16 again, plus most of the new vendors that have sprung up this year. Some have fallen off, others have held rank. It gave me joy to realise that I’d have to expand the list to 20 places, because ice cream in London is getting better, bit by bit, and excellence is slowly diffusing across the city. Each place on this list has something about it that sets it apart from the legions of other ice cream shops in London, a constellation of traits that maps roughly onto the C.U.N.T. (Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent) matrix of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Talent is an ice cream that is technically perfect, with a physically implausible, almost alchemic texture. Some places are here for their Nerve: an incredible attention to detail in creating unusual flavours, or having the pluck to do something, anything, different. The Charisma of a place boils down to whether it is somewhere I really want to be – somewhere that pays attention to the art of serving ice cream, not just the science of making it. Most important of all, though, is Uniqueness: great ice cream is exactly itself, mirroring the dreams, memories and idiosyncrasies of the person making it and the place where it’s made. Every one of the following ice cream makers express both themselves and London through the medium of milk and ice.
Note: unlike last year, these ice creams are listed in no particular order
Finks
There are two genres of ice cream sandwich. The first includes cookies with scoops, saffron bastani in two wafer moons, a slice of neapolitan ice cream between rafts of edible-grade polystyrene and Maxibons. These have the same teleology as any other sandwich, which is just to make a messy thing portable. The other kind of ice cream sandwich is the result of questions that most of us would never think to ask. What if a hot fudge sundae had the build of a Ford Bronco? What would a biblically correct Snickers look like? The outstanding ice cream sandwiches at Finks in Finsbury Park are just this – notably the peanut butter caramel one, bookended with brownie-like, dark chocolate cake.
Fink’s Salt & Sweet, 70 Mountgrove Rd, N5 2LT and other locations
Saffron Kitchen
I first tried Saffron’s bastani last year, when the shop was a juice and ice cream bar on the nape of the North Circular. Since then it has moved to Ballards Lane in Finchley, at a point of convergence of some of the most interesting Iranian food in the city right now. The shop now sells regional stews, but you’ll still find that chewy saffron-gold bastani too. The tubs and wafer sandwiches would be Too Much if not for the delicacy of the add-ins: frozen clotted cream shards, pistachio slivers and the wistful note of rose at the end of a bite. To my mind, Saffron’s bastani is the ice cream gestalt – the world in every bite.
124 Ballards Lane, N3 2PA
Levant
Levant is, by far, the best ice cream parlour in London. When I last visited it was Eid al-Fitr and the place was teeming with families playing board games, sticky-mouthed children fighting over cool pistachio booza sandwiched in warm baklava and guys nursing a single plate of halawet el-Jibn between them while orchestrating a queen’s gambit. It is the only place in London that I can think of that rivals the late-night ice cream culture of Los Angeles. In Park Royal, Sameh Asami has created the elusive sweet spot where as much care is given to how the booza is eaten – at leisure, with the whole family, in comfort – as how it is made. There is a branch of Levant in Shepherd’s Bush (which sells some intriguing mastic-set scoop ice creams as well as the more traditional Syrian booza), but the original in the middle of London’s largest industrial estate is the finest, which goes to bolster the central thesis of this guide: that the best ice cream is seldom what or where you’d expect.
26-28 Standard Rd, NW10 6EU