In San Francisco, Mitchell’s Ice Cream Is the People’s Choice

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

If you wondered what everyone in San Francisco was doing at 10:30 on a Friday night during the hottest week of the entire year, I can offer some insight: Almost all of them were standing in line outside Mitchell’s Ice Cream.

That’s what it felt like, anyway, when we pulled up to the classic Mission District scoop shop, sticky with the sweat of yet another 90-degree October day. Even half an hour before closing time, there were probably three dozen eager ice cream eaters gathered on the sidewalk and crammed inside the shop — a 20-minute wait at a minimum after you grab your number from the ticket machine inside. Go on a weekend, almost any time of day, and it’s always the same. This is an ice cream shop for people who don’t mind standing in line.

Anyway, Mitchell’s enduring popularity — now going on 71 years — speaks for itself. On the night of our recent visit, the chatty, upbeat crowd consisted of almost every imaginable demographic: flocks of teens, big, multigenerational immigrant families (Arab, South Asian and Filipino American), jocks, nerds, lovey-dovey young couples and at least a handful of solo middle-aged men treating themselves to a late-night sundae (because why not).

And that’s because in the Bay Area ice cream scene, Mitchell’s has long been the people’s choice — the big-name San Francisco ice cream brand that most resonates with so many of our region’s multicultural communities.

Some context: When it comes to ice cream, I’ve always been a texture snob, which means I usually gravitate toward newer-school shops that emphasize the extra-creaminess of their product — say, a Bi-Rite or a Lush Gelato. Mitchell’s, on the other hand, makes pretty classic, old-fashioned hard scoop ice cream. What sets it apart is its near-encyclopedic selection of tropical fruit flavors you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else, at least in the same quality and sheer variety: mango, lychee, ube, avocado (treated properly here as a fruit, as it is throughout most of Asia), lucuma, coconut pineapple, jackfruit and more. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, it was the first ice cream shop to bring these tropical flavors to the Bay Area, using fruit imported directly from Southeast Asia.

It’s no wonder, then, that in my heavily Latino neighborhood in Richmond, there are only two ice cream shops — and both of them sell Mitchell’s exclusively. And no wonder that the Bay Area’s Filipino American community has largely adopted the brand as its own. After all, what other local ice cream shop sells buko (young coconut), macapuno (“sweet, meaty coconut”) and vegan roasted coconut flavors — all made with coconuts imported from the Philippines? And that’s before we even get to Mitchell’s two most iconic Filipino flavors, its mango and ube ice creams. The shop even sells a version of halo-halo, as a “sundae,” that’s as well regarded as many of the ones sold at proper Filipino restaurants. (In fact, for many years I labored under the illusion that Mitchell’s was actually owned by Filipinos. It isn’t.)

So when I’m in the mood to travel to that particular island of frozen-dessert paradise, Mitchell’s Ice Cream hits the spot like no other shop in the Bay.

What we loved, too, was the controlled chaos of the place on a busy night — the patience with which the staff divvied out sample tastes to the crowd pressed up against the display case; the hulking Australian who marveled, as he watched his sundae getting made, “This guy’s a legend. Look at the size of that, it’s the size of a baby’s bottom!” This is the kind of place where a stranger will, unprompted, give you a glowing review of the lucuma ice cream — a butterscotch-like flavor made with a Peruvian fruit, the man explained. It’s next on my list to try.

This time, we stuck to the classics: a double scoop of avocado and ube, both luxurious in both their bright colors and the way the flavors were a true, sweet distillation of the original fruit. And then, because we were caught up in the whole celebratory spirit of the place, we got one of Mitchell’s exorbitantly sized banana split sundaes — something we hadn’t even thought about ordering in years.

What a joyous thing to eat! It came topped, old-school McDonald’s style, with strawberry sauce, peanuts and whipped cream, plus Maraschino cherries for good measure. For the ice cream, we’d chosen toasted almond (a more flavorful stand-in for vanilla) and mango (some of the best we’ve had in the States), adding a tropical twist to the all-American treat. And in the heat of the night, as we ate our sundae hunched over on the sidewalk, the strawberry sauce and the whipped cream and the melted parts of the ice cream slowly mixed together into the most delicious slurry.

Mitchell’s Ice Cream is open 11 a.m.–11 p.m. daily at 688 San Jose Ave. in San Francisco.