So here it is, the benchmark that we base all our ice cream reviews against. Morellis is our local ice cream parlour in Broadstairs. A wonderful throwback to a bygone era where art deco ruled the roost and the British coast line was peppered with a mini Italian Gelato Empire.
This is the original and (in our unbiased opinion) best Morellis.
Historically, the Morellis family emigrated to the UK in 1907 and started selling Ice cream from the back of a bike, moving on to a van and eventually opening up this branch in Broadstairs in 1932. The family were the first in the UK to serve 20 different flavors of ice cream on a daily basis (still an amazing sight to behold).There are now 13 branches around the world, including one other in the UK found in a small time shop in London called Harrods.
On the walls of the parlour are Certificates and Awards from years gone by from the Ice Cream Alliance - Looking at the ICA website Morellis won numerous awards this year including a Silver Challenge Cup (Gold Award) in the ice cream open class. Panning around we see beautiful features such as the Brass ice cream cone shaped lights on the wall, an old style juke box (our son Benji loves this as its free to choose a track....he's not even 2 yet but he loves the buttons) and the piece de resistance, an original Soda Fountain - sadly not in use for soda anymore but is used as a water feature.
And so we come around to the ice cream. We should point out, this is not cheap. As is the case with many places prices have gone up to meet the costs of the essential ingredients and still make a profit to continue running. Prices range from £2.20 per cone and rise to £8.95 for the most decadent of creations (The Broadstairs Special).
Although we've visited a couple of other ice cream establishments in the past few days while off work on our equivalent of a summer holiday we didn't think it was right to start our blog anywhere other than here and so we made a special trip especially for you, dear reader, because we couldn't find any of the previous photos we'd taken. Much ice cream was consumed in the way of research and here are some pictures to give you an idea of what to expect when you visit:
The Morellis Special, one of our favourite sundaes (although not my absolute favourite which is Berry Pavlova) consists of a scoop of chocolate ice cream, a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a scoop of another chocolate -based ice cream (in this case Ferrero Rocher but it depends on what's available that day) topped with hazlenuts, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, a banana, a wafer and a flake. It's immense. There is also a fruit version of the same (entitled the Broadstairs Special) which is also fairly fantastic, particularly if they have blood orange that day.
We didn't take a picture of the ice cream cabinet because it was actually only half full on the day that we went, which is a pretty rare occurrence unless its' winter. A picture of it in its' full height - of - summer glory will follow in a future post we promise!
As a side note, we will also be reviewing the experience as a whole when we visit places that involve ice cream - we will take into consideration the venue, the price and the staff, a very important factor for anyone's visit - this is actually where morellis falls back. It is a very busy parlor and on occasions staff have been too busy and tend to look and act rather stressed. Add this to the fact that morellis is in need of a good lick of paint as some of its art deco features are starting to show signs of time and this can deter people (take a look at tripadvisor to see what we mean).
Broadstairs has a lot to offer the daytripper, especially when the weather is good, but the ice cream at Morellis is the reason we will always keep coming back.
On the walls of the parlour are Certificates and Awards from years gone by from the Ice Cream Alliance - Looking at the ICA website Morellis won numerous awards this year including a Silver Challenge Cup (Gold Award) in the ice cream open class. Panning around we see beautiful features such as the Brass ice cream cone shaped lights on the wall, an old style juke box (our son Benji loves this as its free to choose a track....he's not even 2 yet but he loves the buttons) and the piece de resistance, an original Soda Fountain - sadly not in use for soda anymore but is used as a water feature.
And so we come around to the ice cream. We should point out, this is not cheap. As is the case with many places prices have gone up to meet the costs of the essential ingredients and still make a profit to continue running. Prices range from £2.20 per cone and rise to £8.95 for the most decadent of creations (The Broadstairs Special).
Although we've visited a couple of other ice cream establishments in the past few days while off work on our equivalent of a summer holiday we didn't think it was right to start our blog anywhere other than here and so we made a special trip especially for you, dear reader, because we couldn't find any of the previous photos we'd taken. Much ice cream was consumed in the way of research and here are some pictures to give you an idea of what to expect when you visit:
 |
| a banana royale and two Morellis Specials |
The Morellis Special, one of our favourite sundaes (although not my absolute favourite which is Berry Pavlova) consists of a scoop of chocolate ice cream, a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a scoop of another chocolate -based ice cream (in this case Ferrero Rocher but it depends on what's available that day) topped with hazlenuts, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, a banana, a wafer and a flake. It's immense. There is also a fruit version of the same (entitled the Broadstairs Special) which is also fairly fantastic, particularly if they have blood orange that day.We didn't take a picture of the ice cream cabinet because it was actually only half full on the day that we went, which is a pretty rare occurrence unless its' winter. A picture of it in its' full height - of - summer glory will follow in a future post we promise!
As a side note, we will also be reviewing the experience as a whole when we visit places that involve ice cream - we will take into consideration the venue, the price and the staff, a very important factor for anyone's visit - this is actually where morellis falls back. It is a very busy parlor and on occasions staff have been too busy and tend to look and act rather stressed. Add this to the fact that morellis is in need of a good lick of paint as some of its art deco features are starting to show signs of time and this can deter people (take a look at tripadvisor to see what we mean).
Broadstairs has a lot to offer the daytripper, especially when the weather is good, but the ice cream at Morellis is the reason we will always keep coming back.
 |
| yum. |
We should take a moment to rank Morellis out of 5 for experience -
And for the Ice cream out of 5 -
