Vermont Comes to Brooklyn and Brings with It Some of the Best Ice Cream Ever

By Sarah Zorn

Feeling less than enthusiastic about trading in frozen cocktails and heirloom tomatoes for pumpkin lattes and brussels sprouts? Boy, do we feel you. Which is why maple creemees might be just what the doctor ordered, to facilitate a more graceful transition from summer to fall.

Essentially swirls of soft serve, fashioned from maple syrup, maple sugar, milk and cream, they’re only one of the sap-centric concoctions available at A Corner of Vermont—a mecca of Green Mountain State favorites in the center of Park Slope. Paper cups of khaki-colored lemonade, spiked with streams of grade-a syrup from a squeeze bottle, and cumulous clouds of maple cotton candy, whipped into a frenzy on-site, are also worthy ambassadors of the in-between season.

For the most part though, the knotty pine-paneled hideaway—its walls hung with snowshoes, and shelves stocked with syrup from Black Bear Sugarworks, the owners’ century-old, 250-acre maple farm—is simply biding its time until autumn. Because the majority of items on the menu are best enjoyed whilst snugly enveloped in reindeer-patterned sweaters, sipping apple cider by crackling fires in cabins in the woods — or, you know, cocooned under blankets in your apartment, cuddled up to space heaters.

Take hot dogs sourced from Black Watch Farms of Weathersfield, Vermont. A mix of beef, pork and bacon in sheep’s casings, they’re substantial enough even before being prepared a la “The Vermonter,” lined with maple mustard and maple caramelized onions, and dusted with granules of nubby maple sugar. There’s smoky beef chili as well, bulked out with curls of sharp Grafton cheddar and smatterings of coarsely chopped sweet onions, along with grilled cheese sandwiches on sourdough, smeared with cranberry-orange chutney, and maple candy molded into crystalline snowflakes, five-lobed leaves and teddy bears—that New England gift shop standard—except at Brooklyn’s very own Corner of Vermont, they’re actually handcrafted in house.

If you’re having a tough enough time resigning yourself to the very idea of Labor Day, the thought of bacon-larded sausages and maplewood-smoked sandwiches is sure to push you over the edge. So for now, just go ahead and stick with the creemees, a last lick of summer with just the faintest hint of fall.

374 5th Avenue, Park Slope