Thomas Sweet

I wonder if Thomas Sweet has ever met Larry. I'm guessing not because Thomas could learn a lot from him. Larry's Homemade Ice Cream in Dupont serves flavorful ice cream made with interesting ingredients. Yes, the customer service is terrible, but the ice cream is good. Thomas Sweet in Georgetown on the other hand, serves weird frozen yogurt and (at least on this occasion) icy ice cream lacking flavor.

My first issue with Mr. Sweet is his menu board. Its a jumbled mess of a chalkboard that makes ordering more complicated than it needs to be.

Last year, before we began going steady with Mr. Yogato, we decided to pay a visit to Mr. Sweet to sample some of his frozen yogurt. We spent probably $12 for two frozen yogurts, and only got a year's worth of laughs out of the experience. The man behind the counter took a dixie cup, filled it with yogurt, then turned the cup upside down and dunked it into the toppings bin. We were left with a tiny cup o' yogurt with toppings falling all over the place, and paid an arm and a leg for it. This was our first intro to "DC frozen yogurt" and we knew we were in trouble.

One hot night we found ourselves in Georgetown and wanting some ice cream. We decided to give T. Sweet (no relation to T. Pain) another shot. The original plan was for me to order a "small" sundae and B to order a waffle cone. The plan was quickly ditched when we saw how "small" my sundae was. We scrapped the waffle cone order and shared the sundae.

The sundae looked promising and the toppings were generous and tasty. The problem was with the ice cream. I ordered cake batter but I think they forgot to add the cake batter part. It didn't taste like anything and the texture was icy. The menu board is so confusing that I wasn't clear whether I could get more than one flavor in my sundae, so we were stuck with glorified vanilla masquerading as cake batter. It wasn't a total loss though because we were in Georgetown after all. There were popped collars galore and a guy in orange pants and loafers debating the merits of all 55 of the varieties of fudge for sale. Great people watching, mediocre ice cream. True story.

Second Thoughts from B

When we wrote about Larry's Ice Cream I said, "even bad ice cream is pretty good." Unfortunately, in the 2-3 times we've visited Thomas Sweet, he has put that theory to the test. Everything looks so promising too. The cute, old-timey storefront and sweet smell of fudge transports you to whatever carefree childhood memory you have of days gone by, when stuffing your face with ice cream was your idea of heaven.

With that mindset, we dove into our mountain of ice cream, fudge, and whipped cream with high hopes. However, if this were a TV show, this is when the needle would scratch across the record, because the ice cream could have been taken from our tub at home, freezer burn and all. Maybe I'm a slow learner or maybe I'm just a sucker, but I can't imagine that Thomas Sweet can't do better. What I can believe is that in the world of ice cream, Larry kicks the you-know-what out of Thomas any day.