Cream Bar offers cool new dessert concept
Photo credits: Jenna Fong
The long-awaited replacement of Red Mango, a frozen yogurt chain on the Streets of Woodfield that closed down last year, finally made its appearance. The new specialty? Ice cream sandwiches.
The Cream Bar has now opened its doors to its eager customers, including many local students. Red Mango was a popular spot for many Conant teens, so the new business has high standards to live up to. Fortunately, the Cream Bar brings a fresh, innovative take on dessert.
The Cream Bar allows customers to create customizable ice cream sandwiches. There are three stations — each a step in the sandwich-building process. The first has the custom bases of the dessert, freshly baked cookies of all different flavors. There is also a gluten-free option and even delicious brownie squares. These serve as the base and top of the sandwich. The next step allows for the customer to choose their preferred flavor of ice cream from a plethora of different options.The final station gives the option to add various toppings to the dessert. The station offers a diverse range of sweets, ranging from fruity pebbles to gummy worms, to finish off the unique treats.
Unlike many frozen yogurt shops, the dessert is prepared by the employees, and it almost combines an ice cream or fro-yo shop and a bakery into one store. Besides ice cream sandwiches, customers can also opt to buy ice cream in a cup, a sundae, or cookies. The Cream Bar does a good job providing desserts to cater to all types of customers.
As soon as you enter the Cream Bar, you notice its warm and modern decor. It has wooden and pastel tones that make the experience comfortable and cheerful. There is also a gallery of bright photos of the desserts being sold. It’s a brilliant idea that gets customers hungry and excited for the food to come.
Additionally, service is wonderful. The employees were smiling and willing to help out. They would occasionally walk around to make sure that customers were all satisfied. They worked together and were always going around the restaurant to keep things in order. It’s surprising how much impact a smiling face could make on a meal experience.
The food was satisfactory overall. The cookies were no better or worse than those you could buy in a store. When it came to ice cream, the texture and quality was nothing special, but the variety of flavors was a plus, especially since there were unique choices like peanut butter and even some seasonal flavors. Together, the cookie and ice cream make a very nice treat, with a great combination of flavor and texture that makes up for their average stand-alone qualities.
Unfortunately, the execution of the sandwiches was imperfect. The ice cream sandwiches were messy to eat, even with a spoon. It made it hard to actually get through the cookies to get a bite of ice cream, and made the experience more difficult than eating a treat should be.
In general, the concept for the Cream Bar is excellent, and implementation is fair.
Rating: 3.5/5 popper bowls
Graphic credit: Eleanor Park
I’ve been wondering about this place. Thx for the great review!