Brooker's Founding Flavors Ice Cream, Provo UT

Thirteen drinking chocolates and a scoop counter

The drink to order is the drinking chocolate, poured in thirteen flavours for the thirteen original colonies, which tells you most of what Brooker's Founding Flavors is doing. It is treated as a main menu category rather than a seasonal extra, and there is nothing quite like it at an ordinary ice cream counter.

The ice cream itself is super-premium and made in house on the company's own recipes, and the counter builds it into sundaes, banana splits, milkshakes and ice cream cakes. Flavours are named out of the Revolutionary era, so choosing one is part of the theme rather than a separate exercise.

A colonial room with costumed staff

The room is themed hard and on purpose. Colonial decor, period-styled music and costumed staff turn a dessert stop into a set piece, with the American founding era running through the naming, the walls and the service. The company calls itself an ice cream revolution and stages its shops as taverns.

The Provo branch is one of a group across Utah working to the same script, and staff are trained into the concept rather than dropped behind a counter, which is why the theme holds together instead of reading as decoration. It suits families and groups better than a quiet solo stop, and it is a dessert destination rather than a cafe you would work from. Expect the theme to be committed to rather than gestured at.

Building the order

Start with a scoop of the house super-premium ice cream, since it is the base everything else is built from and the quickest way to judge the recipes. If you want something more constructed, move to a sundae or a banana split. If you want the same flavours cold and drinkable, take a milkshake.

Drinking chocolate is the order with no real equivalent elsewhere, and a thirteen-flavour list rewards more than one visit. Ice cream cakes are the large-format version for a group, made from the same in-house ice cream rather than bought in, which keeps the whole menu inside one product. With a group, order for the table rather than individually, since the sundaes and splits are built to be looked at as much as eaten and the flavour names are half the entertainment.