(2 of 10)
This is the very Steve's where the legendary Steve Herrell, a Boston cab driver and sometime high school teacher, popularized the whole mind-and-body-expanding idea of mix-ins when he founded the place back in 1973. History was made, served and spooned here. Herrell sold his shop to the brothers Joey and Nino Crugnale in 1977 because he wanted to go west; he got as far as Northampton, where he now operates Steve Herrell's Ice Cream. Joey Crugnale, who shyly describes his outrageously heavy and rich ice cream as "the best," keeps a player piano jingling away in the corner and sometimes has his store manager cheer up the pilgrims standing in his lines by holding trivia quizzes (sample: "Who was the only actor to win two Academy Awards in a row, and what were the movies?" Answer: Spencer Tracy for Captains Courageous [1937] and Boys Town [1938]). This is known in the restaurant trade as ambience.
Still, aren't the prices just a trifle extortionate? Are we really talking about $2 for just one scoop and some candy crumbs? Has everybody gone crazy?
Students of the ridiculous will answer these questions in different ways. What is undeniably true is that serious eaters, especially in college towns and in those East Coast and West Coast cities whose inhabitants like to think of themselves as civilized, no longer have the slightest tolerance for ice cream ordinaire. An unpresumptuous little chocolate ripple does not interest them; they want presumption. And to say that they are willing to pay ruinous prices for it—$7 a quart for hand-packed ice cream is not unheard of—is to understate the case. They demand the right to pay these prices.
Passion of this intensity translates to steady sales for the ice-cream industry ($1.6 billion in 1979) when sales of all kinds of desserts have dropped off by 40% over the past decade and a half. Ice-cream sales in the U.S. hit a peak in 1975 and since then have declined slightly (from 15.69 qt. per capita last year to 14.62 qt.), but sales of the most expensive and best-tasting brands have been increasing by about 17% a year and now command 11% of the market. Americans produced 829,798,000 gal. of ice cream in all grades last year, and we eat more of it than anybody else, with Australians and New Zealanders spooning their way across the finish line a distant second and third. If all that tonnage is hard to get the teeth into, conceptually, the International Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers is happy to calculate that it would provide ten single-scoop cones for every human being on earth, an idea that might make the MX missile unnecessary—at least until the chocolate chip ran out.