'Gourmet' Celebrates S.F.'s Consummate Coolness

La Copa Loca's Ice Spaghetti Pomodoro.

​No less a culinary pillar than Gourmet has declared San Francisco (and the East Bay) a zone of terrific cool this week, with a list of eight ice cream parlors that are the magazine's cherries on top. This honor owes largely to our explosion of artisanal shops (Ici, Lush Gelato, Humphry Slocombe, La Copa Loca, Bi-Rite Creamery) as well as a handful of traditional family favorites (Polly Ann Ice Cream, Mitchell's, Fenton's Creamery).

While we don't adore the lines that tend to snake out of places like Bi-Rite and Mitchell's on a daily basis, there's never a question about why they're forming. These places deserve to be on the map of anyone visiting the Bay Area with a sweet tooth and a yearning for something more than a vanilla approach to creativity.