The creative ice-cream sandwiches at these sweet spots prove that the handheld treats don’t have to be as basic as a scoop of vanilla between chocolate wafers.
miXt Food Hall
3809 Rhode Island Ave., Brentwood
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Pastry chef Susan Theis loves taking her cookies and matching them with locally made Simple Pleasures ice cream to create flavorful combos such as summery lemon-sugar cookies bookending strawberry ice cream or dark-chocolate rounds with cherry-stracciatella in the middle.
The Baked Bear
929 Rose Ave., North Bethesda
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Choose your own adventure by picking cookies, such as funfetti or Nutella chocolate chunk, adding one of a dozen ice creams (think butter-brittle cake or caramel pretzel fudge), and selecting indulgent toppings. Then decide if you want your sammy hot-pressed or cold.
Goodies Frozen Custard & Treats
200 Commerce St., Alexandria
We didn’t think it was possible to make a cinnamon-sugar cider doughnut any better until we found this one stuffed with vanilla frozen custard and zigzagged with caramel.
Fight Club
633 Pennsylvania Ave., SE
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Chef Andrew Markert gets nostalgic with his Saturday-morning-breakfast-inspired sandwiches made with blondie-style cookies and vanilla ice cream studded with Cinnamon Toast Crunch and baby marshmallows.
Captain Cookie
2800 Tenth St., NE; 660 Pennsylvania Ave., SE; 2000 Pennsylvania Ave., NW; 2200 Clarendon Blvd., Arlington
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These food trucks and scoop shops combine killer cookies—including double chocolate, ginger molasses, oatmeal raisin, and five others—with vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry ice cream.
This article appears in the July 2023 issue of Washingtonian.
Nevin Martell is a parenting, food, and travel writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Saveur, Men’s Journal, Fortune, Travel + Leisure, Runner’s World, and many other publications. He is author of eight books, including It’s So Good: 100 Real Food Recipes for Kids, Red Truck Bakery Cookbook: Gold-Standard Recipes from America’s Favorite Rural Bakery, and the small-press smash Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip. When he isn’t working, he loves spending time with his wife and their six-year-old son, who already runs faster than he does.
