Museum of Ice Cream- San Francisco, CA

“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!”

From vanilla soft serve to nitrogen strawberry buttermilk in a cone, ice cream makes our stomachs do a happy dance and our worries go away. It’s the universal cure for a bad day at work and brings out the inner child in all of us.

Centered in San Francisco, the Museum of Ice Cream does just that. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “a museum? for ice cream? seriously?” But let me stop you right there. The Museum of Ice cream isn’t just a MUSEUM. No, no. Nor is it simply an ice cream shop.

It’s the Disneyland for ice cream lovers. So hot in demand, in fact, that visitors have to book tickets three months ahead of time just to get in.

After all, who wouldn’t be excited about a Museum of Ice Cream?

Before entering the museum, a cheery employee asks each visitor to tell her one of their stresses. The museum of ice cream, she says, requires that each visitor be stress free before visiting… lest the gummy bears stage a revolt!

The first room in the Museum of Ice Cream is the ice cream vault. This time, the employees make you play a pop quiz on the history of ice cream. “When is National Ice Cream day?” they ask. Turns out, it’s in July. The ice cream vault is an interesting place. A converted bank vault, it contains all of the museum’s exhibits, including the sprinkle pool and Marye’s diner.

I’ll only go through the highlights of the museum–after all, I don’t want to spoil it all–but hopefully, this virtual tour gives you some insight on whether you want to visit the next time you’re in San Francisco.

After we passed the ice cream vault, we were brought to the museum’s dance floor, where dancing is required every step of the way! With whipped cream walls and a photo area, the room was filled with dancing foodies.

All that exercise on the dance floor left us hungry for food. And we got some! Marye’s Diner was our next stop, an old-school ice cream parlor with old records and tall pink stools.

At Marye’s, we were served some delicious pink soft serve ice cream, which nostalgically tasted like red, white, and blue rocket popsicles. And of course, I had to get my aesthetic foodie picture (I am a sophisti-teen, after all).

Marye’s Diner was followed by an area filled with cotton candy and cherries. “Who’s your cherry on top? Send them a note of love and appreciation,” they’d say. A heartwarming welcome to the land of cotton candy, accompanied with our very own sweet cotton candy!

Needless to say, the cotton candy was the cherry on top to this room (that was really bad– forgive me).

Afterwards, we passed through the famous gummy bear room to the mint chocolate chip jungle and most importantly, the UNICORN room! Filled with real fake unicorns and a dizzying mirror room, the unicorn room celebrated San Francisco’s beautiful diversity in honor of pride month. As a bonus, we also received some seriously delicious popsicles. I chose coconut– the whole thing was polished off in seconds.

Then, of course, there was the famous sprinkles pool. Filled with plastic sprinkles (NOT edible), the pool was the perfect photo op (though possibly an unsanitary one). This is the exhibit you always see in Instagram posts, where teenagers have there very own photoshoots, searching for the perfect aesthetic posts. Can you blame them?

Here’s my not so instagrammable picture 😉 :

And sadly, that concludes our virtual tour of the ice cream museum. Thanks for stopping by!

While it wasn’t a museum in an educational sense, the Museum of Ice Cream certainly brings smiles to faces. With its selection of ice cream, cheery employees, and photo opportunities, it’s a great way to spend an afternoon in the beautiful city of San Francisco.

Cheers, and see you next time!

XOXO, Anya. (@inspector_food)