The Best Ice Cream Shops in Toronto
Few things say summer in Toronto quite like the slow shuffle of an ice cream line. You smell the waffle cones before you reach the window, you change your mind three times reading the board, and then you walk off into the heat with a cone already threatening to drip down your wrist. It is a small, repeatable joy, and this city does it better than it gets credit for.
What makes the scene so good is the range. On one end, you have the institutions: family-run parlours that have churned the same recipes for thirty, forty, even fifty years, where the person scooping might be the grandchild of the person who opened the place. On the other, a new generation of makers is rethinking what a scoop can be, spinning custard bases heavy with egg yolk, building fully plant-based menus that fool lifelong dairy lovers, and turning local, seasonal fruit into soft serve that changes by the week.
Some of these spots are year-round comfort. Others are seasonal, opening with the first warm days and drawing lineups dozens deep until the weather turns, then quietly shutting until spring. A few are worth a transit trip across town on their own. Most are cash-only takeout windows with a bench or two out front, which is exactly how it should be.
At Tastet, we only put an address on a list if we would actually send a friend there, and these are the ones we send people to. We have a soft spot for the classics and an appetite for the experiments, so this one runs the full spread: Yorkville mainstays, cottage-country dairy legends, Asian-inspired custard, vegan pints, gelato on a stick, and old-school soft serve dipped and rolled to order.
Grab some cash, wear something you do not mind dripping on, and work your way through. Here are the ice cream shops in Toronto worth lining up for.
Summer's Ice Cream
A few steps below Yorkville Avenue, Summer’s has been scooping homemade ice cream since 1984, when the Tokey family carried over a recipe with roots in 1930s Košice. Three generations later, the waffle cones are still pressed on site every day, and the butterscotch still has a devoted following. Order at the counter, climb back up the stairs, and eat your cone watching Yorkville go by. The line tends to hold both teenagers and the occasional celebrity.
Toronto
Bang Bang Ice Cream & Bakery
The line down Ossington is part of the ritual at Bang Bang, the ice cream offshoot of bakery Bakerbots. The signature move is a cookie sandwich, two freshly baked cookies hugging a scoop of something like London Fog, burnt toffee, or matcha genmaicha tiramisu, though the Hong Kong egg waffle cone gives it a real run. The space barely fits ten people, so grab your order and keep walking. The line moves fast, and it earns the wait.
Toronto
Ruru Baked
Pastry chef Luanne Ronquillo built RuRu Baked on custard, folding egg yolks into a base that comes out dense, rich, and low on air. What began as a pandemic pop-up now scoops out of a Bloordale shop with a rotating board of a dozen or so flavors pulled from a catalog of more than eighty. The Asian-inspired ones are the heart of it: Viet coffee, miso butterscotch, black sesame, honeycomb cereal milk, banoffee pie. Check their socials before you go, because the flavor you came for might already be sold out.
Toronto
Honey’s Ice Cream
Honey’s makes the case that all-vegan ice cream can stand entirely on its own, no apology and no dairy required. Named after the owner’s dog (there is no honey in it) and run by a Bunners co-founder, the plant-based pints turn up in flavors like chocolate cinnamon babka, Niagara grape sherbet, and sweet corn with sour cherry, with oat-flour cones for the gluten-free crowd. Scoops are at the Dundas West and Leslieville shops; the pints travel home. More than one self-described dairy devotee has been quietly converted here.
Toronto
The Big Chill
Step into the Big Chill on College and you are in a full retro parlor: checkered floors, marble counters, humming neon, and a wall of cow-themed kitsch watching you choose. There are more than thirty flavors and twenty-some fixings, which works out to a near-endless number of sundaes, and the waffles come off the iron fresh enough to perfume the whole room. A few mini Oreos crown nearly everything, a small house signature. When the patio opens in summer, there is sometimes live music to go with the scoop.
Toronto
Ed's Real Scoop, Roncesvalles
Ed Francis helped build the early internet, then retired to the Beach and opened an ice cream shop because he could not find a good one nearby. Since 2000, Ed’s has churned small batches slowly, on site, with Ontario milk and cream, which is why every scoop lands so dense. The flavors rotate with the season and the mood: burnt marshmallow, blueberry pie, beach fudge brownie made with brownies baked in house, and a spring run of vanilla shot through with Cadbury mini eggs. There are now four shops, in the Beach, Leslieville, Roncesvalles, and Mimico.
Toronto
Super Serve
Super Serve does one thing, soft serve, and does it from the kitchen it shares with El Rey next door in Kensington Market. The combinations are numbered and lean sweet-and-salty: vanilla swirl under cornflake-pretzel crunch and salted caramel, say, or a strawberry build finished with milk crumbs borrowed from a Momofuku recipe. Co-owner Owen Walker describes the goal as that moment when you dip a fry into ice cream. Portions are generous, the tile floor is mint-green checkerboard, and there is a vegan special every month.
Toronto
Kawartha Dairy Danforth
Kawartha Dairy is cottage country in a cone. Family-run out of Bobcaygeon since 1937, it is the dairy whose tubs end up in every Muskoka freezer, and the scoops are famously oversized. Made with Canadian milk and cream, the flavors skew classic and comforting, the same ones you grew up eating off a dock. The Danforth scoop shop means you do not have to drive two hours north to get one.
Toronto
Bar Ape Gelato
Bar Ape (say it ah-pay) started in 2014 as a vintage Piaggio gelato truck and has since parked itself in a tiny window on Rushton Road in St. Clair West. It runs seasonally, roughly spring to fall, serving soft-serve gelato in two rotating flavors plus a twist, built around whatever local fruit is good that week: Niagara grapes one visit, brown butter or sour cherry the next. The texture is smooth and dense, closer to Italy than to a truck. Bring cash, everything runs around seven dollars, and plan for a line.
Toronto
Dutch Dreams
Dutch Dreams has been a Toronto landmark on Vaughan Road since 1985, opened by the Aben family on the very day Holland was liberated, and it has not toned anything down since. The shop is wall-to-wall figurines, Tiffany lamps, and whimsy; the cones are hand-dipped in chocolate and rolled in candy or crushed Nutter Butters; and the kosher ice cream leads with fresh cream across fifty-some flavors. Go big with the Super Royal Baked Alaska, a fifteen-minute production that arrives lit by a sparkler. It is over the top on purpose, and that is the whole point.
Toronto
Tom's Dairy Freeze
Tom’s Dairy Freeze has been swirling soft serve from the same retro shack on The Queensway since 1969, real cream and all, under a great curved awning that feels frozen in time. The classics are vanilla, chocolate, or twist, dipped if you want them dipped, but the regulars chase the secret menu, like the Cookie Monster: vanilla dipped in blue raspberry and rolled in crushed Oreos. It opens with the first warm days and closes when the cold comes, turning into a Christmas tree lot for the winter. Bring cash, join the line, and watch it move.
Toronto
Roselle Desserts
Roselle is a Corktown pastry shop first, but every summer it becomes a destination for one thing: its Earl Grey soft serve. The swirl is infused with whole tea leaves over toasted milk, and for a little extra they’ll inject it with lemon cream and finish it with white chocolate pearls and a tiny shortbread. It’s only around in warm weather and it sells out, so treat a sighting as your cue to get in line. Pick-up window, cashless, with an app if you’d rather skip the wait.
Toronto
La Diperie Harbord
La Diperie brought its build-your-own dipped soft serve up from Montreal in 2014, and the idea still holds: a thick swirl of vanilla plunged into one of dozens of molten coatings, from dark chocolate and caramel fleur de sel to Bailey’s and gingerbread, then rolled in the toppings of your choice. The shell sets firm, so nothing drips. With counters in the Beaches, on the Danforth, on Yonge and near the CN Tower, plus late hours, it’s the easy answer to a post-dinner sweet craving almost anywhere downtown.
Toronto
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