A Scoop from the Golden Age

(Eddie's exterior. Image from Yelp.)

Occupying a beloved corner space on Metropolitan Avenue for over a century, Eddie’s Sweet Shop in Forest Hills maintains its reputation due to an old-fashioned approach to serving America’s favorite dessert. Antiquity radiates from within this ice-cream parlor, as everything from the marble countertop, to the homemade soda floats, to the vintage cash register seems embalmed in a long-gone era when sweets, prepared with a localized family-owned passion, felt equally splendid on the tongue and heart.

[Note: Let me acknowledge that the past, when viewed from posterity, always seems infinitely better than it in fact was. That’s beside the point here. When a store can in the present encapsulate the past’s ideal and keep it feeling genuine, it has inarguably achieved something great.]

But nostalgia for those chrome postwar years aside (how many Hollywood cameras have passed through its doors?), Eddie’s can still deliver on its renowned signature product. The ice-cream – and especially the beverages, be they milkshakes, malts or floats with the soda brewed right in front of you – is usually thick, rich, and poised to clean the most soiled pallet. Ice-cream scooped from a vat in a freezer, however, can be inconsistent no matter where it comes from, so I advise the uninitiated customer to stick with soft-serve. No other such shop in the immediate vicinity (read: all of New York City) could match it.

The milkshakes, though, hold a notable distinction among my taste buds. Every time, Eddie’s serves me what is easily the best milkshake I have ever tasted. I’ve slurped up some fine milkshakes in my day. A handful of anonymous diners come close. Marvel, a seasonal parlor out on Long Island, comes close. Larry’s, which I plan to profile once I return to Washington, can hold its own. But Eddie’s has invariably proven itself to reign high above the rest, and probably always will.

Rustic entities have a hard time avoiding obsolescence. Quite often they visibly decline, and the shop’s cracked floors and rickety metal stools might put off an unknowing patron. Admittedly, any old building comes afflicted with the petty nuisances of age. But should an ice-cream parlor that looks fit for James Dean appear pristine and squeaky-clean fifty years after the Eisenhower Age ended? For me, the shop’s archaic qualities, be they charming or inconvenient, validate its relevance and enhance the overall experience of frequenting it.

In a time when everything we eat and enjoy seems pre-prepared by dispassionate machines in a far-off factory, a taste of some down-home, simplistic, fundamentally humane ice-cream from a longtime local staple goes to show that we have done, and continue to do, better that what we are used to. Thankfully shops like Eddie’s, despite growing rarer with each passing year, are still around to remind us.