Ashley’s Ice Cream

This ice cream shop needs no introduction in New Haven. Its customers include many former presidents, members of Congress, justices, scholars, celebrities and so on, who are all Yale alums.

Ashley’s Ice Cream promised from Day 1 that it will never use any artificial colors or flavors. All natural, fresh ingredients lead to naturally the best ice cream the crew at Ashley’s can make everyday. One of its signature ice cream is Oreo, and there are more than a dozen other flavours too, without any artificial materials or chemicals in the ingredients.

The first and original Ashley’s Ice Cream shop started in the 1970s on College Street, just steps away from the dormitories of Yale University, and later it moved to the current location on York Street near Yale Law School. Apart from New Haven, Ashley’s also has four other branches in Connecticut.

Ashley’s Ice Cream
280 York St, New Haven, CT 06511

Milkcraft New Haven

In comparison with my last visit to New Haven (two years before the pandemic happened), a very noticeable change is now we have many ice cream shops in the college town. Isn’t it amazing? I guess many Yale students must be big fans of ice cream.

This shop (which is said to be originally from Japan) is proud to make ice cream all on site. I got the “best vanilla ever” ice cream in cup and it did taste naturally good. It also has something called “bubble come”, which is just like Hong Kong’s signature street food egg waffle (雞蛋仔), and imagine if you get ice cream wrapped with that!

Watch the video to see how the ice cream was made on site.

Milkcraft New Haven
280 Crown St Suite 100, New Haven, CT 06511

Ice Cream, A US-China Story

This is the most classic ice cream with a very long history in China since the early 1900s, also related to American influence, culture, and technology at that time.

American politicians and businessmen came to Shanghai for their “adventures” in the early days and they had homesick, including missing Western-style ice cream in the summertime. In 1913, an American dairy factory was established in Shanghai and it quickly entered ice cream business to primarily serve the foreign and local elite communities in Shanghai.

At the very beginning, the original brand of its ice cream was called “Beauty” (美女), and the brand was renamed as “Brightness” (光明) in 1950 following the Communist Party’s victory of the Civil War. Make sense? A bright new era just started for China. That’s the new meaning.

The late famous Chinese writer Eileen Chang (張愛玲) was one of many fans for “Beauty” ice cream, quite a luxury for the local in the old era of Shanghai. Today the new “Brightness” brand is already a household name in Shanghai and occupies a dominating share in the domestic ice cream market in China.

Former Chinese President Jiang Zemin (江澤民) was a factory manager for Yiming Foodstuff (益民食品), parent company of “Brightness” dairy and ice cream products before Jiang started his political career and became the Mayor of Shanghai.

You can now order “Brightness” ice cream online, directly shipped from Shanghai to Hong Kong, thanks to highly efficient logistics and e-commerce technology nowadays of course.