Charlie’s Ice Cream Social

Neat little neighborhood ice cream shop. The kids in our party loved the old-​timer feel, and they had a nice deal on kid’s cones for the summer going on. Very pleasant and friendly service.

Cute little spot. Good variety of interesting scoops. We enjoyed their $ 1 kid in cream cones last night. Just the right amount and they let the adults buy them too.

Charlie’s has a little something for everyone. If you prefer soft-​serve, you can get a blended treat that our server compared to a DQ Blizzard in concept. If you prefer ice cream by the scoop, you can get that too. I had a mix that included Nilla Wafers and cherries in vanilla ice cream with whipped cream on top. It was good but not excellent (though I have to say my benchmark for ice cream is Sweet Action and they have a totally different take on ice cream going on). If you’re in the area, stop in; if you’re not, don’t rush.

I think this place is underrated. I’m not sure when soft-​serve ice cream became an abomination instead of just a different way to serve ice cream, but alright. Their Dairy Queen-​style twisters are sugary deliciousness. The only complaint I have is that there are way too many so you spend 10 minutes deciding and even then you don’t know if you chose correctly. You can’t really go wrong, though. Their hard-​serve Mexican Mocha is amazing. I’m also partial to their Cake Batter. Most of their hard-​serve flavors are really good. It does seem ridiculous that they usually only have one poor high school-​aged worker present, even during the summer, and there’s basically no parking. Nonetheless, this place is pretty great.

My buddy Matt’s place! Love the variety, décor, and ice cream. Great family run ice cream parlor.

While I think they could have a few more people working at any given time (expect a wait) the ice cream is awesome and the people who work there are great! Yokozuna with vanilla ice cream… yes please!
Great neighborhood ice cream shoppe! Definitely recommend this to others!

What a cute and yummy place.
I got their kid size Cookie Monster twister which is like a blizzard. It was soft serve vanilla ice cream with 3 types of cookies.
It was hard to pick which twister to get when they have so many tasty sounding ones on the board.
Looking forward to returning here.

Listen closely, fellow Unilocalers. Guiness chocolate chip ice cream. Got lost at Guiness? Yeah me too. This ice cream was REALLY good! I am not a «shout from the roof tops» Guiness fan, but this ice cream had a subtle flavor of Guiness that ws not overpowering. YUM!

First off, I truly enjoyed the peanut butter, salt cashew twistamabob thing I ordered. And the one girl working behind the counter was great. BUT… right after my friends and I were served this poor girl got bombarded with customers. Why would the owners have only one person working on a very warm summer evening. There should have been at least two others working to help this poor girl. Really pissed me off to have to watch her struggle so unnecesarily. I blame the owners and management for allowing such a shit show to take place. Charlie, you are a total A-​HOLE!

Seriously huge portions at a great price. The ice cream was delicious and the staff was very friendly and helpful with their recommendations. I love the inside décor and music as well. I will definitely be back the next time I am in town.

I love this place! I love the concept the favors and the service!

On my next trip here, they started serving hard pack ice cream, the kind you need a scoop for. They had a variety of flavors and the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough hit the spot. The hard pack also makes for a much better cone. They are improving.

Variety of Ice Creams would be nice… follow the example of Sweet Action… they are a hit… be one too! Get creative and people will be coming in! :)
Having the ice cream machine is lazy to be honest.

Someone didn’t get the memo about the fresh and natural trend going on in the food world. YUCK. No, I don’t want you to put sugary syrup in my ice cream. Dude has it all wrong. After I asked why they flavor the ice cream with syrup he tells me it’s just like the old ice cream parlors. No, no, no, no. I think he must have been talking about old school Soda Fountains that flavored SODA WATER with concentrated syrups. Pretty sure they just put fruits and chocolate sauces on their ice cream back in the day. Sorry Charlie’s, you may have had a cute idea, and I really wanted to like the only walkable ice cream shop in the hood but, no. Bad, just bad.

Came in tonight with my wife and immediately was struck by what a neat place this looked like. Between the décor and the music, they really nailed the old-​school retro ice cream place that so many places strive for. You really do feel like you are stepping back in time. We really thought we had found a gem.
We really wanted to like this, and our experience here. I don’t want to be overly critical, or bash this place, but I really find it mind-​boggling that they only have soft-​serve ice cream, and only 3 flavors of it. This is counting swirl as a flavor. And they make different flavors by using the syrup that is prominently displayed up front. Everything sold here is derived from a basic soft serve machine that I could find at the Golden Corral. And 90% of the menu is «Twisters», like a DQ blizzard. And it doesn’t seem like you can build your own, unless you pay 75 cents for the most basic toppings. i really genuinely think the proprietor and his staff think they are giving you an abundance of options, but it comes off as silly and borderline comical. Do I want vanilla, chocolate, or swirl in my cookies and cream twister?
How could they have gone to so much trouble putting together such a neat place, but completely botched the concept? You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Just get ice cream. Why would I come here when I could go to a real ice cream shop, or Dairy Queen, or Yogurtland or one of the buffet-​style Ice Cream shops? It’s more expensive here too.
i really don’t Unilocal at all. And I suppose I admire the courage to try to do something new, but I would be absolutely shocked if this place lasts without a serious overhaul to the ice cream options, or lack thereof. It doesn’t take a PHD in restaurants to realize that you have to have actual ICE CREAM in an ice cream shop.
Please do your great location/​physical space justice and get some real ice cream and do it the old fashioned way to match your theme… i hope you can do it.

I have to say that I more than happy with the butterscotch malt I got here tonight. While I was at first disappointed that the ice cream was soft-​serve, I realized that soft-​serve probably makes a better shake. I am looking forward to trying some of their signature Twisters. You can go with the other reviews and skip the plain cone with toppings (go to Little Man for that), but do try a malt here!

I have to concur with the other reviews. I got the peanut butter hot fudge twister. No major complaints about the food –although the whipped cream comes out of a generic «whipping topping» can that you buy at Safeway (with fake ingredients). It was overpriced and nothing special about the ice cream. The employees seemed frazzled, the atmosphere was uninviting and the floors were dirty.

I really wish I could give more than one star, but if you read the
descriptions, a two star-​review means: «Meh. I’ve had better.» And that’s just too high a rating for Charlie’s.
I hope they can figure out how to make better ice cream. Their toppings are pretty intruiging: sea salt, cayenne pepper, pop rocks – they clearly have some good ideas. But the execution of their mainstay – aka, ice cream– is pretty appalling.
I wanted a baseline from which to judge, so I ordered a vanilla cone. First mistake. I don’t know how the chocolate is, but if it’s the same recipe/​temperature that they use for vanilla, you are better off ordering a soft drink than a soft-​serve cone. The vanilla ice cream was yellow – OK, I can handle that. Real vanilla turns things yellow. But the texture of the ice «cream» was ghastly. It moved across my tongue like shaved ice. No creamy texture at all. It was more like a snow cone than an ice cream cone. I would have thrown it away but my husband was so excited to try to this place, I didn’t want him to think I was poo-​pooing it right out of the gate.
I almost forgot to mention that my cone had sprinkles on it. That’s probably because I forgot there were any. The girls at Charlie’s need a new delivery method for their toppings. I can’t believe they charged a full $ 0.75 for sprinkles. Shouldn’t there be some free toppings? Especially since a barrel of sprinkles probably costs $ 3 max. But I digress – dropping a single ice cream spoon-​ful of toppings onto a cone is a very poor method of attaching said toppings. Take a cue from Dairy Queen, Charlie’s, and roll your ice cream cone in the toppings you’re charging nearly a buck for. Oh that’s right – you CAN’T roll it because the icy-​milky main event will slide right off the cone and onto the floor.
Man, I really hope they were just having a bad day. Like maybe their ice cream machine had turned evil, like in that Emilio Estevez/​Stephen King movie where the machines take over. I think it’s called, «Maximum Overdrive.» If I see some better reviews in the future, maybe I’ll go back. Until that happens though, it’d be hard to go to Charlie’s when there’a a McDonalds down the street that has mastered the ice cream for their cones. And they only cost a dollar.

I hate to drop a bomb like in this first review but hopefully it will allow the people who own Charlie’s to make some changes to the way that they do things — as the things that are wrong here are not related to the fact that they’ve been open for 3 days.
The soft serve is TERRIBLE.
This is a problem because this is a soft serve only ice cream joint. My wife got a vanilla cone with sprinkles. For a regular size, this was $ 2.75. $ 2.00 for the cone and $ 0.75 for the sprinkles. That’s right .75 cents for sprinkles, and there were about 20 sprinkles which attached themselves to the awful softserve which is a pretty good .03 per sprinkle profit for them.
What makes the soft serve so bad is everything. It’s practically inedible — I wanted to spit it out. It’s a light yellow, and waxy like melted candles.
It doesn’t feel like it’s the right temperature, if it tasted good. The mouth feel is awful, as well as being waxy tasting it doesn’t melt correctly on your tongue.
Lastly, the way they apply toppings is to sprinkle them over the waxy ice cream which doesnt allow toppings to adhere, and as a result the toppings end up falling into the other containers. It’s just not a well thought out process.
I had a Boardwalk shake (Caramel, Sea Salt, and Chocolate Ice Cream) which was better because it wasn’t vanilla, but it still had the waxy consistency that the vanilla had.
Considering that the prices here are so high, something has to change or they will be going out of business before the summer is over. You get a much worse product than McDonalds or Dairy Queen for a higher price. I will gladly pay more for local when its an equal or better product — but I won’t patronize a place just BECAUSE they are local. The IDEA is great, the application is awful.