Frosty Queen: Our Town's Pride and Joy

image lifted from Snap Man on Flickr



Who needs corporate chains like DQ or Foster's Freeze? Not us -- we've got Frosty Queen. Sure, the tables are often gummy with melted soft serve and at night the lighting can be downright creepy, but this place turns out flawless soft serve. Is it ice cream, ice milk, or some sort of gum-based non-dairy mcflurry-esqe mystery substance? If you're brave enough to tell yourself the truth, you'll admit that you don't really want to know the answer. You just want more.

On a menu this extensive, everyone will have their personal favorite, and mine is the chocolate soda float. It's like a root beer float, but instead of root beer flavored syrup, they put in chocolate syrup, and the key is that they don't stir it too much. That way, you get three separate tastes -- the bite of plain soda water, the sweet chocolate syrup and the creamy puff of ice cream. As it melts, these three distinct flavors begin to mingle into one, so that by the last sip, they've unified into a creamy, chocolately, tangy bliss.

This Citysearch reviewer puts it most succinctly:

• Pros: cheap, fries are great, parking lot
• Cons: weight gain, heart attack, early death

Frosty Queen was even written up by a real reviewer -- see this 1996 Counter Intelligence column from the Los Angeles Times -- who says, "nothing here beats a simple, perfectly executed malt or shake; thick and sweet, it goes right to your head and belly. In fact, there may be no more satisfying way to suck down a thousand calories or more."

Frosty Queen is one of the only Granada Hills places that might lure someone from the rarefied reaches of non-Valley Los Angeles to dare to enter our realm. Word of Frosty Queen's greatness has even spread as far as the post-hipster enclave of Silverlake, from which a friend of mine once made a pilgrimage. Yes, they came from that far. And yes, it's that good.