![]() They have several shops along the Jersey shore.įrozen Custard didn’t stay on the east coast for long. ![]() But, according to food lore, frozen custard first arrived on Coney Island in 1919, introduced by New Jersey-based ice cream vendors Archie and Elton Kohr. There was no contest.Ĭustard has been around for centuries. I only knew it beat the competition all to hell. ![]() I didn’t know it tasted as good as it did because it was made with butterfat and eggs. No, frozen custard was the pinnacle of sweet, summer dairy treats. Sorbet was too fancy, and we didn’t even know what gelato was at the time. I grew up a true Wisconsin boy, which means ice cream never impressed me. I loved Gilles’, too, because when we went there that meant frozen custard. I understand how the place would have loomed large in her imagination. My mom would have been eight years old when it opened its doors. I knew Gilles’ was important to my mother because, even when we lived an hour west of Milwaukee in the 1970s, she would sometimes go out of her way to take us there. Many of the above have closed, but Gilles’, in business since 1938, is still standing on West Bluemound Road in Wauwatosa. There was Karl Ratzch’s, the tradition-rich German restaurant Usinger’s, peerless maker of German sausages Marshall Fields, the Chicago-based department store that has a single outlet in the Milwaukee area and was the toniest store in town Hughes’ Chocolates, a purist candy maker that worked out of the basement of a house in Oshkosh Stein’s Garden Center, which has served Milwaukee’s gardening needs since 1946 Watts Tea Shop, above the Watts china shop, where a sophisticated shopper could enjoy a pleasant lunch the Fox & Hounds, a cozy culinary retreat about an hour northeast of Milwaukee The Elm Grove Inn, which was in business for 150 years until it closed in 2008 and Gilles’ Frozen Custard. And many were interlaced with her German heritage, of which she was proud. Most were related to her childhood growing up in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa and, in her mind, connected to an idea of Old Milwaukee ways. My mother had her places, businesses she was fiercely loyal to and returned to again and again until she passed. ![]() A beacon in the night atop Gilles’ Frozen Custard. ![]()
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