Crunch Coat

There are two places called Dandi-Lyons, a couple of miles apart; today we're talking about "Dandi Lyons Ice Cream Flowers" (that's what the sign says which has amused me for years - the artwork even has a flower growing into the letters) on 28 in Reading. Plenty of parking and a dozen picnic benches, 3 ordering windows on one side and a delivery window around the corner, and traditional yellow flourescent lighting. (There's also a section of the building which might have once been the flower shop but seems clean but closed.) Still open until 9pm mid-September.

First Visit

Dandi-Lyons menu is mostly classics, though it does have some highlights (and an explainer list by one of the menus); "Crunch-a-saurus" - blue Vanilla with chocolate-covered rice krispies - is one of the more unusual sounding items. I went with Chocolate Overload and Totally Turtle.

Chocolate Overload was a rich dark chocolate "with stuff in it", including brownies. The ice cream itself had a legitimately dark-chocolate flavor to it and was quite creamy. It also has an entirely normal color, when not under yellow flourescent lighting; in future visits I will have to see if my phone can be convinced to do manual color balance, the automatics are doing it no favors here.

The "Totally Turtle" photographs much more appealingly under my car's white LED interior lighting - more importantly, it has a really nice butterscotch swirl as well as crunchy pecan and other mixins. The butterscotch is also available on their ice cream sundaes - they do soft-serve sundaes, and I'm not sure if that's unusual or if I've just missed it before, but it's an interesting novelty.

They also have frappes, "flurrie", slush, and "hard yogurt." They also specifically have Chocolate and Rainbow jimmies (I haven't been tracking carefully enough to measure where the Jimmies vs. Sprinkles battle lines are drawn, perhaps next year) and Crunch Coat, as well as three different flavors of dip cone - so for a future visit I will probably either try a dip cone or the crunch coat on something. For hard ice cream, I'll probably go back for Totally Turtle, though Heath Bar Crunch and Crunch-a-saurus also look interesting.