Ice Cream Chronicles (Year 5): Bucyrus...This Is Truck 275, Over

As a younger lad, I was a huge fan of TV medical shows (something which may have come from my mom's love of the soap opera "General Hospital".)  I wasn't particularly picky, so I enjoyed the broad spectrum of shows from "Marcus Welby, M.D." to "Julia", progressing on to "Medical Center" and "Quincy, M.E.", and finally "Doogie Howser, M.D." and "ER."

But perhaps my favorite of the bunch may have been the exploits of paramedics Johnny Gage and Roy DeSoto on the show "Emergency!" on the NBC Network. One of my favorite things about the show is that not every dispatch was necessarily worthy of a true 911 call, though there almost always would be one multi-alarm, disaster-in-the-making challenge in each episode.

While the hot weather around here can feel sometimes that there was a rapid-response service for rapid cooling relief, the true 911 is generally not the manner to call for that.  However, the closest thing for that might just lies roughly one hour north of the metro in Bucyrus, a town of roughly 12,000 people that celebrates the Bratwurst like few others.

Ice Cream Chronicles (Year 3): No Matter How You Pronounce It....

One thing I learned fairly quickly upon moving to the Buckeye State: correct pronunciation of Ohio place names is something of a minefield. Only one other state I've encountered (Washington, with tongue-twisters like Puyallup, Tshletshy and Steilacoom) outdoes the Buckeye State with unexpected or seemingly incongruous pronunciations.

I started a mini-debate not too long ago, when I wandered through the Western Ohio town of Piqua in search of some frozen goodness into the confines of downtown's Susie's Big Dipper. I asked how Piqua was pronounced, and got the proper "PICK-wah" response from the older of the two ladies behind the counter.

"I heard somewhere that Piqua really is like Pickaway?" The younger of the two, almost assuredly a teenager, posed the question cautiously as if she were sneaking through her neighbor's backyard to escape notice. On this day, no such luck.

"What do you mean?" The older woman glanced at her younger partner quizzically.

The younger gal fidgeted her response, saying that her classmate told her that the name of this town should really be more pronounced like the South Central Ohio county because of their origin from the same Indian tribe, but that the pronunciation changed over time.

"No, no, no!" The following explanation was a bit lost on me, with lots of references to a local history teacher and the "Indians" (in the general sense, and most definitely not Cleveland's baseball version.) Suffice it to say, I was convinced that Piqua and Pickaway had nothing to do with each other at ALL by the end of that exchange.

Ice Cream Chronicles (Vol. 19): In A South End Town and Dead End Road - Lombardi's Dairy Diner

Lombardi's Dairy Diner lies on the southern reaches of the Columbus metro

With all due respect to the Pet Shop Boys and, for that matter, the owners of Lombardi's, this roadside restaurant does not lie on a dead end road.

However, it's quite easy enough to drive right by this extreme southern Columbus metro area eatery on your way south on US 23 towards Circleville if you're not aware it's there. You may see it coming northbound on the same highway, but traffic at the closest intersection may discourage you to make that turn to get there (along with State Route 665 from the Grove City area, State Route 317 circles down from Southeast Columbus past the Rickenbacker Airport area to feed into this intersection.) Scioto Downs, just a half-mile north of Lombardi's, can add to the multitudes of automobiles that travel through this area.

Lombardi's offers a low-frills roadside diner experience, with the
usual menu items and a variety of ice cream options

But if you do veer off these main roads into Lombardi's parking lot, you will find a low-key, low-frills eatery that serving its roadside diner fare for over 40 years (according to the restaurant's website, the restaurant is open all year, but the hours vary with the season.) All the familiars are on the menu, from coneys to burgers, a variety of sub sandwiches to fried bologna, and pasta and pizza dishes. On this day, their restaurant sign touted their seafood options such as their lake perch, oysters and shrimp.

On this day, however, I was here for the ice cream. And to borrow from the Pet Shop Boys again, Lombardi's offers visitors a hard or soft option: roughly 20 flavors of traditional ice cream, and vanilla and chocolate soft serve (a swirl of both is also available.) This soft serve option presented a mild dilemma on this day in that a combination of kid-like nostalgia, a nice price (a large will set you back only $2), and the fact that I just simply had not had a soft-serve cone in awhile was pulling me away from my usual sampling modus operandi. An added factor was my status on this day as a solo traveler.

But then I figured out something pretty quickly: why choose when you don't have to?

Which do you choose, a hard or soft option...how about both?

The butter pecan, my standard flavor choice, was quite good. But on this day, the soft serve won out as the favorite, though I downed both cones with equal pleasure.

I ended up quite full (yes, this was quite a bit of ice cream) after downing these frozen treats, and I semi-regretted it for just a slight while afterward. But since I don't go past Lombardi's and this south end town all too often, I figured this was, in the end, just a big down payment for the next time we pass this way again.

Lombardi's Dairy Diner
6251 S High St (US Route 23)
Lockbourne, OH 43137
(614) 491-7570
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Ice Cream Chronicles (Pt. 7): Love Handel's

The store front in Toledo, Ohio

Mrs. 614orty-Niner and I happened to be on the road in Northwest Ohio when we found out it was National Ice Cream Day. Obviously, it seemed seemed to be a shame on a warm summer day to miss out on some frozen goodness just because we were traveling, so we looked for a solution that wouldn't take us too far out of our way. Luckily for us, Handel's was around to save the day.

Handel's was originally established in 1945 in Youngstown in the northeast portion of Ohio. Alice Handel would produce her ice cream using old-fashioned recipes and fruit from her backyard and sell it out of her husband's gas station. Since then, Handel's has grown to thirty-plus stores spread out across six states, with two of those locations within the Columbus metro area.

Their ice cream has received "Best Of" commendations nationally, including prominent media outlets like People Magazine and USA Today. According to the company website, all of their ice cream and yogurt is produced fresh daily at their stores. The stores themselves have maintained a very distinctively-designed ice cream stand motif, with occasional exterior variations like their stores in California.

Just some of the many flavors available

If you want anything ice cream related, Handel's pretty much has it. Scoops, cones, sundaes, cakes, pies and pre-packaged pints are available, as well as creations like the Hurricane (very much akin to Dairy Queen's Blizzard) and a Handel Pop, which is a scoop of ice cream coated with a hard chocolate shell propped on a wooden stick. Handel's boasts about 100 flavors overall, including limited-edition and seasonal specials and occasional creative names like "Spouse Like A House" (malted vanilla ice cream with chocolate coated pretzels and peanut butter) and "Graham Central Station" (graham cracker ice cream with graham cracker chunks.)

With their sign touting a "Christmas in July" special, my spouse couldn't resist getting one of her favorite flavors, peppermint stick. I went with two scoops, with one of my standards (butter pecan) and one suggested by the friendly young lady manning the store (coffee chocolate chip.)

One thing we noticed immediately was how quickly the ice cream started to melt. Indeed, Handel's is by far the smoothest and creamiest of the ice creams texture-wise that we've had, and the melting only enhanced that mouthfeel.

Soft, smooth and perfectly melty

My spouse very much enjoyed the peppermint stick, but by far the star of the show for both of us was the butter pecan. This version was the definition of why I came to love the flavor so much as a child: big chunks of pecans with a base that combined the right amount of salty with sweet. This version basically blew any of the other butter pecans I have tried recently out of the water. Unfortunately, the coffee chocolate chip, the scoop at the bottom of my bowl, probably got the short shrift; there was nothing wrong with it, but by comparison to the butter pecan, it had no chance to impress.

There's an iconic ice cream picture motif that almost always brings a smile to all: a child enjoying his ice cream, with melted ice cream both coating their lips and cheeks, and little streams of their frozen treat flowing onto the hand grasping the ever-increasingly soggy cone. If I had to pick one ice cream out of those I've tried so far to put on that cone to get outcome, Handel's would be my nominee.

Of course, that's not the only scenario I would personally grab myself a scoop or two of Handel's. I mean, who needs unnecessary limitations in their life?

Handel's Ice Cream (location visited)
5908 W Sylvania Ave (Google Maps)
Toledo, OH 43623
(419) 882-1118

Columbus Metro Locations
5665 Feder Rd (Wexford-Thornapple - Google Maps)
Columbus, OH 43228
(614) 853-4464

399 West Olentangy St (Google Maps)
Powell, OH 43065
(614) 336-3813
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