Maine ice cream shop once again named one of America’s best

Ellen McDonald, ice cream artist at Mount Desert Island Ice Cream, serves up a cup of sweet basil coriander streusel in this 2014 file photo. (BDN photo by Kathleen Pierce)

Ellen McDonald, ice cream artist at Mount Desert Island Ice Cream, serves up a cup of sweet basil coriander streusel in this 2014 file photo. (BDN photo by Kathleen Pierce)

Mount Desert Island Ice Cream, which has already been lauded as one of the country’s best ice cream makers by the ABC talk show “The View” as well as Food & Wine magazine, is adding another voice to those singing its praises.

TimeOut New York, the Big Apple’s branch in a worldwide network of lifestyle magazines, issued its list of America’s 21 best ice cream shops this week, and the famous Bar Harbor-based company was among the chosen scoop slingers.

Reads TimeOut:

“Against all climatic odds, New England has long been a hotbed of ice-cream ingenuity. Mount Desert Island Ice Cream — Linda Parker’s artsy, blue-hued trio of scoop shops in Bar Harbor and Portland, Maine — honors that heritage, combining the quaint charm of the seashore with a cosmopolitan flair. On the one hand, you get such nostalgic nods to regional cookery as Indian pudding and blueberry-sour-cream crumble; on the other hand, you get savory-toned, modern flavors like celery leaf, chocolate-wasabi and miso-butterscotch. What you don’t have is three hands, which is too bad, because then you could get a Chiller (Parker’s sorbet-based take on a Slurpee) to boot.”

When President Barack Obama took a vacation on Mount Desert Island in 2010, he was pictured enjoying a coconut ice cream cone at the landmark scoop shop, and outlets like Newsweek, Fox News, USA Today and Yankee Magazine have touted the local company’s imaginative flavors over the years.

Other scoop shops on the TimeOut list include Bi-Rite Creamery of San Francisco and the Azucar Ice Cream Co. of Miami.

Sweet basil coriander streusel at Mount Desert Island Ice Cream tastes like a state fair and carnival combined. (BDN photo by Kathleen Pierce)

Sweet basil coriander streusel at Mount Desert Island Ice Cream tastes like a state fair and carnival combined. (BDN photo by Kathleen Pierce)