Stop 7: Christina's - July 14, 2009

We started our time at Christina's by trying a few flavors. I tried chocolate banana, which had a strong banana flavor, but not much chocolate flavor. It almost tasted liked unsweetened cocoa powder. Andrea had some sort of butter finger flavor, which she reported tasted very strongly of butter finger and nothing else. Allison tried carrot cake, which she reported tasted like rich frosting. This wasn't my experience when I ate it in the past, so I'm not sure the samples do justice to Christina's flavors. Maybe there are too many spices and other mix-ins in each flavor to fully capture all the flavors on one sample spoon.

Anyway, I ended up having peanut butter chip yogurt, which was a new flavor for me. You don't find peanut butter frozen yogurt all that often and I had never had it with chocolate chips. It was creamy, with just the right amount of peanut butter flavor. The chips were small, which was unique. Usually there are large chunks of chocolate in flavors like raspberry chip or chocolate chip. The small chips were very flavorful and because of their size I got chocolate in every spoonful. Overall, 9/10.

Allison got coconut almond yogurt, which she reported was also very creamy and the best yogurt/ice cream she has tried so far on the tour. Andrea had chocolate orange ice cream which she was also very happy with. She reported it was like the orange butter flake she got at Toscanini's, but not as rich.

One scoop of ice cream (1/2 c.) was about $2.75 and two scoops were about $3.50 - an average value for an ice cream place in the city. I think the only negative was that the staff weren't as nice as at some other places. Everyone at Toscanini's is always very nice and upbeat and they let you spend a lot of time sampling. The men at Christina's seemed a little annoyed that we weren't ready to order right away. Overall, though, a great ice cream experience!