by Luke McKinney
FoodConnect Toronto
luke.mckinney@foodconnect.com

A small ice-cream store perched at Bloor and Spadina, Greg's doesn't look like much. Until you pass by on a summer afternoon and see a queue filling the store and winding along the sidewalk outside, while the Baskin & Robbins opposite stays empty. It's popular because of its secret weapon: its strawberry ice-cream actually tastes like strawberries.

You may be critically un-shocked by that revelation until you realise what it means. The stuff doesn't taste like "strawberry ice-cream", or condensed berry syrup, or E433 or whatever it is every other allegedly strawberrian thing you've ever had is full of - it actually tastes like the real thing, because it IS full of the real thing, and the same is true of every flavor on the menu.

Even the really bizarre ones, multi-nounal names that look like a demented chef started throwing darts into a dessert menu and combining whatever names he hit. Each one tastes utterly authentic, and even the most bizarre blending of bits works, and works well.

Their most famous flavor is "Roasted Marshmallow", and deservedly so. Something like that in a chain store would be a saturation of sacharrine, a candified crystal of chemicals holding more in common with a pharmacy than anything that was ever over a campfire. At Greg's you can taste the marshmallow and even, I kid you not, the actual flavor of toasting over an open fire. In ice-cream. No, I don't know how it's done but am almightily glad it is.

They have a surprisingly slick website for a business that's so dedicated to traditional means (Greg himself has been making single-batch barrels of ice-cream for seventeen years), but be warned: don't look unless you're able to go immediately, or you'll just be torturing yourself.

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