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There is an appealing "Hey, why don't we ..." quality to such stories. Gary Shaefer and Barbara Fingold were practicing family therapists in western Massachusetts a few years ago; they suspected that cuts in social-service funding lay ahead. In 1978 they bought Bart's, an older ice-cream parlor in Northampton, Mass., a hungry college town, where Herrell was to set up his new place two years later. They are now doing very well handing out what might be considered a kind of therapy. Their customers are students, artists, shopkeepers and lawyers, and some of them, says Shaefer, come in three times a day. "It's a social institution; people get phone calls, leave messages, sell houses, close legal deals."
Bob's Famous, a twelve-seat ice-cream parlor in the Glover Park section of Washington, D.C., has, in the words of one fascinated observer, "intentionally or unintentionally created a kind of hole-in-the-wall chic." It sure has; suburbanites frequently drive an hour each way to stand in a 20-min. line in front of Bob's and pay 950 for a cone and $3.75 for a quart of apple-peanut butter, banana mango or mocha almond. People buy Bob's Kahlua for $17 per gal., and some have spent $40 to airfreight it across the country. Owner Bob Weiss, 35, a lawyer who tired of the profession when he followed his lawyer-wife to Washington, started the shop three years ago, and says wonderingly that he may gross $400,000 this year.
Ice-cream tasting is a notoriously erratic business. Not only subjectivity but sheer numbness is a problem. "Your taste buds get so cold they barely function on about the eighth lick," I.A.I.C.M. Spokesman Witte explains. "Your nose still works O.K., but ice cream doesn't smell much."
Superpremium makers and feeders might take butterfat for thought from a test of 28 vanillas run a couple of Sundays ago by the Washington Star. Nine food experts, including Weiss, rated his own product fifth but decreed that Häagen-Dazs belonged in second place ("pleasing texture," "natural flavor," insufficient "oomph"). Frusen Glädjé was not tested; Alpen Zauber was far down the list, in the "puffy-fluffy, sweet-misery" category, having been rated "creamy but no taste," "salty." So were several other prestige brands: Sedutto's, Bassetts, Baskin-Robbins, Louis Sherry, Breyers and Schrafft's. First place went to the Giant food chain's economy vanilla "Kiss," which sells for $1.29 a half-gallon and contains milk fats, nonfat milk, sugar, corn sweetener, whey, locust bean and guar gums, mono-and diglycerides, calcium sulphate, Polysorbate 80, carrageenin, natural and artificial flavors, natural and artificial color, and the legal minimum of 10% butterfat.