Brooker's Founding Flavors Ice Cream, Vineyard UT

Thirteen drinking chocolates, one per colony

The most distinctive thing on the counter is not frozen. Drinking chocolate is treated as a programme in its own right, with thirteen flavours, one for each of the original colonies, tied back to the drink's place in early American habit. It gives the shop a reason to exist beyond the scoop, and it is the part of the menu that is hardest to find in Vineyard or anywhere else in Utah County.

House-made ice cream with a Revolutionary theme

Brooker's makes its ice cream on site with real ingredients and proprietary recipes, and the house style is super-premium, chunky and swirled rather than clean and restrained. The menu runs through signature flavours, sundaes, banana splits, milkshakes and ice cream cakes, all of it hung on a Founding Fathers conceit that carries into the flavour names: a chocolate called Give me chocolate or give me death sits beside seasonal turns such as apple pie and gingerbread. The room is dressed to match, with colonial decor, period music and costumed staff, and the brand describes the effect it wants as a Disney-style dining experience rather than a quiet scoop shop. It sits beside a multiplex, which fits the way most people use it: a family stop bolted onto an outing.

Start with a drinking chocolate, then go frozen

Order a drinking chocolate first and pick from the thirteen colonial flavours, since that is the part of the menu the shop has built for itself. Then take the frozen side in whichever direction the group wants: a scoop of the house super-premium ice cream for the plainest read on it, a sundae or a banana split when the visit is the event, a milkshake if you are walking on, an ice cream cake if you are not eating it here. A first visit that uses both halves of the concept, one chocolate and one frozen order, shows the whole idea in a single sitting.