Frosty Boy, 1757 Plainfield Ave., open daily from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m.

It felt like June this week in Rochester, with dry sunny weather and temperatures pushing 80. It’s strange, after such a mild winter, to have summer come on so quickly. I certainly missed the sunshine, and was a little too zealous to be outside this weekend, earning myself a sunburn (weirdly on just the left side of my face and my right forearm? How?). 

Naturally, with the summer weather comes the insatiable need for ice cream. 

I still feel new to western New York, even though I’ve lived here for almost three years, and I am a perpetual student of The Best Ice Cream Place in Town. There’s the local dairy, open year-round, famous for its glass-bottled milk in grocery stores and barn-style store in the bougie side of town. There’s the western-NY-chain of frozen custard places, notably with a location that has a walk-up window right near one of the most popular beaches in town. There’s the Chill and Grill, an old quirky mom-and-pop ice cream shop in the little Canal Town east of the city. This weekend, friends and I made a forty-minute drive to visit a famed ice cream shop south of town, which was very much worth it. The “small” scoop was the size of a softball, and it was truly hard to finish so much rich dairy goodness. 

But nothing, no matter how good, no matter how cheap, no matter how late it’s open, will ever compare to the ice cream shop that captured my heart (and my wallet) in summer of 2020: Frosty Boy. 

If you know, you know.

When the world fell to pieces, all of my housemates moved home for a few months. I found myself anxious and lonely and pretty alone—a not-uncommon experience. But then my housemate Hannah came back! Just as the spring was spring-ing and the sun started shining, I wasn’t by myself anymore, and we needed to celebrate. I don’t quite remember the first time we went to the Plainfield Ave. location, but I do remember that the experience was, in a word, transcendent. 

Hannah is dairy-free, making our ice cream and milkshake options fairly limited. We figured with a name like “Frosty Boy” there was a good chance it would be at least passable. But when we pulled up, there was a line all the way out to the street: a good sign. 

There is nothing quite like the social experience of the Frosty Boy line, where no one seems to be on the phone and everyone is in a good, ice-cream fueled mood. Sometimes there are babies or puppies (or on a really good day both)! The eavesdropping on nearby conversations is always 11/10 entertainment value, and inevitably by the time you reach the front of the line the inexplicable aura of Frosty Boy has you seeing who can jump the highest and doing weird impressions of monkeys, or something equally chaotic. But accepted, because that’s just how Frosty Boy is. 

The milkshakes we ordered were so thick (even the vegan one) that it was hard to drink them with a straw, and the only trouble with that perfect day was that there wasn’t a spare seat to sit and revel in the Frosty Boy experience. Naturally, we looked for parks nearby to go for a sunshiny stroll, but if you know that area you already know there aren’t a lot of options. But just down the street, there is a cemetery. 

And if you think about it, a cemetery is pretty much just a park, right? A park with headstones and skeletons, but still a park. So we gave it a shot, and it ended up being a weirdly perfect combination: Frosty Boy and the Cemetery. It sounds like a ska band, but it was really just a dang good time. Because the thing about cemeteries is that there’s not usually anyone else there, so you can be as goofy as you want. Sure, they’re maybe a little bit haunted, but I figure ghosts probably want to see some goofiness now and again too. 

So it became our routine: once or twice a week, in the warm evening sunshine, we would stand in line for our delicious milkshakes and then stroll the cemetery. We chatted about nothing, we read headstones and wondered at names and lives and futures. Thinking back—and really, even in the moment—it was a strange juxtaposition to be walking in a cemetery during a global pandemic, sipping on the source of life itself, a Frosty Boy milkshake. But somehow it was good and it was right, and those moments managed to contain all of the emotions that we were feeling about…everything. 

Even now, every time I’m back in Grand Rapids, I make a point to go to Frosty Boy at least once. Last time it was three times in three days because I just couldn’t help myself. Admittedly, it sets a high bar, but it’s worth it.

Lillie Spackman

Lillie grew up on a forty-acre hay farm in Central Oregon, making the trek to Michigan to study mechanical engineering and sustainability. After graduating in 2020, she moved to Rochester, NY, where her day job as an engineer for the local gas utility funds her outdoor adventures, love of books, various craft projects, and investment in her new community.