On a recent sunny afternoon, Carolyn Kemp stood outside Loard’s Ice Cream in Oakland enjoying a scoop of butterscotch marble – which, she pointed out, is not the same as butterscotch ice cream.
“It needs the ripple, like a ribbon of butterscotch all the way through it,” said Kemp, who lives nearby. “There used to be three shops around here that had butterscotch marble. The other two closed, and then this one closed a long time ago.”
That’s mostly true. A fixture in the Dimond District since the company’s founding in 1950, this flagship Loard’s shuttered during the pandemic. But improbably, like a scoop that falls but somehow bounces off the sidewalk back into the cone, it reopened in June with new husband-and-wife owners.
The shop still carries the 40-plus flavors that’ve inspired sugar-based fever dreams for generations of locals – like cherry vanilla, black walnut and toasted almond, whose formulation supposedly was invented in the Bay Area. It has malted milkshakes, fresh waffle cones and sprinkle-flecked Tropical Treat sundaes. But it carries new things, too, like Vietnamese coffee and sandwiches with names like The Wakobe and The Wentino…