A La Recherche du Temps Perdu - Ice Cream Edition
I sat in my car with the AC blasting, and dug into the cup of Baskin-Robbins with the pink plastic spoon. Nutty Salted Caramel and Jamoca Mousse Royale. The two scoops were melty and just the right consistency, and I liked the flavors I chose. But it wasn't homemade ice cream from Mark & Julie's in New Jersey. For me, eating ice cream unleashes a flood of nostalgia like one bite of the Madeleine for Proust.
Mom and I discovered Mark & Julie's Homemade Ice Cream parlor on Pleasant Valley Way in the Pleasantdale section of West Orange while we were still living in our house in Livingston. It was in a little strip of shops, next to a kosher deli and a few stores down from where our family friend, Mel Levin had his custom framing gallery. After dinner on humid, hot summer nights, or just anytime we wanted fresh made ice cream, we'd drive over and eat our scoops at the little white cafe tables inside the store. Mom always got coffee ice cream with hot fudge. I liked to try different flavors, but for both of us, coffee ice cream ruled.
The small shop was popular and busy with families stopping by after soccer practice, or teens on dates, or seniors out for a stroll – anyone really, who loved delicious, cold, creamy ice cream. The owners were Mark and Julie Orenstein, a husband-and-wife team, who founded the business in 1994. Julie was a bubbly and friendly yenta, encouraging you to try the newest flavors; Mark came off as gruff at first (think Seinfeld’s soup guy), but he was actually a gregarious chatterbox. All you had to do was ask what he’d been up to and he would tell you about the trip they took to Italy, the pain he was having in his elbow, the leaky faucet in his kitchen, or the trouble his cat got into. They recognized their customers, and greeted you by name. Mom and I thought they were hilarious – I think because Mark told a good tale like my mother did. The store was a block away from Sherwood Place where Mom lived as a girl and she would tell me stories of her childhood, scoop by scoop.
We were coffee ice cream connoisseurs (aka snobs). Not enough coffee notes, too much like caramel, too bland. We'd seek out the coffee flavors on the menu wherever we'd go for ice cream and determine whether the place was a keeper.
The gold standard of coffee ice cream, by which all other coffee ice creams were judged (then, and for all eternity) was the coffee chip from Gruning’s Ice Cream Parlor.
Gruning’s was a New Jersey institution. It was another local family-owned business like Mark & Julie’s with 7 locations in our area. Our favorites were Gruning’s in South Orange Village and Gruning’s “At the Top” (of the South Orange Avenue hill), where there was a view of New York City from the back dining room windows. You could also order food from their restaurant menu, and pick up homemade chocolate candy, their signature hot fudge, or gallons of hard-packed ice cream from the retail store area.
Gruning’s coffee chip flavor was legendary. Today, there are Facebook groups dedicated to Gruning’s ice cream nostalgia. The coffee chip gets mentioned in every post. Aromatic, dense espresso coffee flavor, with tiny chopped pieces of proprietary bittersweet chocolate distributed evenly through the rich cream. All you have to do is say "coffee chip" and my mouth drools for some of it. After the stores went out of business in 1984, it was the end of an era. Everyone yearned for more Gruning’s and someone put out their version of the hot fudge, claiming they had the recipe. Nope. Not the same.
Like the revival of Don's Drive In, the resurrection of Bonvini's Pizza (ask anyone from Livingston about these two restaurants, and they’ll chew your ear off about messing with perfection), and the short-lived, fizzled New Coke, nothing matches the original Gruning’s. And no coffee ice cream has come close, though a few have tried.
Our other, reliable backup coffee ice cream was Welsh Farms Coffee Royale. Welsh Farms was local too, with a dairy farm and an ice cream manufacturing facility right in West Caldwell, N.J., 5 miles away from Livingston. We'd get our fresh Coffee Royale scoops in the little shop at the dairy, and either eat it there or bring home tubs of it to keep in our freezer. (This is when a half gallon tub of ice cream was still an actual half gallon). We had one freezer in our kitchen refrigerator, but we also had a behemoth upright 1959 GE freezer in the basement – a vintage workhorse machine – so we could stock up.
Sometimes, we'd eschew the ice cream scoop and bowl niceties, and just stick long-handled spoons in the container. I admit I had a habit of digging out the fudgy chocolate "Royale" swirly part.
You could also find Coffee Royale in local groceries, so there was no excuse for not having any in the freezer. Sadly, Welsh Farms sold the business to the Italian brand Parmalat in 1998, and the new owners tinkered with the recipe. Welsh Farms Coffee Royale 2.0 just wasn't as good as the original. Nothing is.
One summer vacation we rented a beach house in Surf City on Long Beach Island at the southern points of New Jersey. The Yefskys, our close family friends who lived around the corner from us in Livingston, owned a summer cottage in that town. We rented a beach house nearby, so our families could spend a couple of weeks vacationing together. During the days, we'd laze on the beach, troll for hermit crabs in the bay, or wander along the shoreline picking up shells. At night, we'd drive into the town and get ice cream cones. There was no shortage of handmade ice cream parlors on LBI. The best flavors were vanilla with caramel, smooth chocolate, or fresh raspberry, and our go-to coffee. Did it live up to Gruning’s? Probably not, but the summertime experience made up for its shortcomings.
In 1996, Starbucks Coffee came out with a line of coffee ice cream flavors. This was actually brilliant. If a coffee company who specialized in espresso, and turned drinks like Caramel Macchiato into household words, couldn't churn out decent coffee ice cream, who else could? Mom and I found Starbucks ice cream pints at Kings Supermarket quite by accident while we were browsing the freezer case. We hadn’t seen any advertising that it was being introduced. But one day, there was Dark Roast Espresso Swirl, Java Chip, Caramel Macchiato, and Mocha Frappuccino. We bought them all. They were delicious. If we couldn't have the paradigm Gruning’s Coffee Chip or the next best thing, Welsh Farms Coffee Royale, Starbucks Espresso Swirl would have to do.
It existed for about 17 years and melted away as stealthily as it arrived.
We gave other store brands a chance: Haagen-Dazs Coffee, Ben & Jerry's, Edy's (and when I moved to California, Dryer’s and Safeway Signature Select flavors), alas, "nothing compares to you, Sbux.” I never learned why they took it out of the freezer case, but maybe not enough people liked coffee ice cream as much as they like fancy hot coffee drinks. My preference at the moment is the White Chocolate Macadamia Cold Brew. Wouldn't that make a good ice cream flavor?
Mom spent her very last birthday on March 16, 2018, in the hospital. The cancer had returned and she had received a round of chemo. She wasn’t eating even with encouragement. My brother, David, had come east for a business trip and a visit with Mom. I stopped at Mark & Julie’s before going in to the hospital that morning, and picked up a pint of her favorite coffee ice cream, thinking it would be a sweet comfort food she could tolerate. She wouldn’t even take a spoonful. She told me she didn’t want to ruin the joyful memory of eating ice cream at the ice cream parlor. I put the pint in the freezer in the hospital kitchen on the floor. She died a month later, the ice cream untouched.
I found out that Mark Orenstein also died of cancer (pancreatic) in 2022, just after he sold Mark & Julie’s to new owners. The store was shuttered for a while, as they new family was getting acclimated to the neighborhood, and making the store their own. They were like-minded ice cream enthusiasts, who operated a number of other gelato shops in New Jersey. They vowed to continue the Mark & Julie’s legacy, serving the original ice cream recipes alongside their own gelato creations.
Molto delizioso!
