Food critic tries Baskin-Robbins' new flavor: Secret Admirer

On Monday, an elderly man showed up at my door with a dozen American Beauty roses. The moment was awkward, although soon enough the man informed me that the flowers were from Baskin-Robbins. Did America’s largest chain of ice cream parlors still have a thing for me after all these years, despite our well-publicized breakup in the ’90s and my subsequent affairs with Ben and Jerry, Haagen and Dazs?

"This is for you too," he said, handing over a quart of the company’s newest flavor.

Like most of us who grew up during the last century, I enjoyed a happy relationship with the brothers-in-law who started Baskin-Robbins in 1945, or at least their ice cream. In line with the optimism of the period, the shops were frozen emporia of infinite possibility, where a kid could go a whole month without eating the same flavor twice because there were always 31 of them, even during non-leap-yeared Februarys.

They built an empire on the idea that postwar America would be a swaggery-restless-dynamic place, not a chocolate-vanilla-strawberry one, a bet that eventually paid off in the form of 8,000 parlors in 55-plus countries and an ice cream cone-shaped pool in Irv Robbins’ backyard. The company’s flavor library, meanwhile, came to number more than 1,400, a pink sampling spoon guide to the American Century. Baskin-Robbins launched Baseball Nut when the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to LA in 1957, Beatle Nut for the Fab Four in 1964, Lunar Cheesecake in 1969, and Gorba Chocolate — saluting a certain Soviet leader’s role in the fall of communism — in 1990.

Some flavors were successes, some flops, some sensations. To this day there are people who think that the company invented not only Pralines ’N Cream but pralines themselves. That was a fan-favorite of my sisters, while I was a German Chocolate Cake aficionado, and remained so through wars, recessions and millennial fears, up to and including our present turbulent times, and have the family photographs to prove it. (And no, smarty, they’re not black-and-white but boldly weird Kodacolor, thank you very much.)

I am a believer in the sanctity of marriage between one man and one flavor, so am probably not the best person to weigh in on Secret Admirer, Baskin-Robbins’ Valentine’s-themed flavor of the month. According to the company’s description, it features "decadent pink cake flavored ice cream"— yeah, I was lost too — "swirled with an unexpected rose ice cream" — oh, so the bouquet, got it —" and sealed with a sweet strawberry ribbon." My quart did not taste like flowers — and I count that as a good thing, although I did enjoy the tart streaks of real berry flavor. Basically Secret Admirer is an attractively swirled strawberry scoop, soothing yet simple.

So far, the 21st does not feel like America’s century, or Baskin-Robbins’. (Insert rocky road joke here.) It faces stiff competition from an ever-proliferating number of ice cream shops, competition from supermarkets, where its own quarts are surrounded by high-quality ice creams, and internal competition from co-brand Dunkin, with which it shares many a storefront. But all is not lost. Surveys show that Americans are eating more ice cream than ever these days, a pandemic-boosted lucky break for Baskin-Robbins.

Couples are splitting up in record numbers too, and ice cream remains the number-one bad way to deal with a breakup. Which explains why I was so confused when that guy showed up at my door. I’ve never gotten ice cream and roses at once.

Secret Admirer is available at area Baskin-Robbins locations during the month of Feb., details at baskinrobbins.com.

By Scott Vogel

scott.vogel@newsday.com

Newsday writer and restaurant critic Scott Vogel aims for a refreshing, gimlet-eyed take on the Long Island food scene, often while drinking a refreshing gimlet.