Red’s Dairy Freeze, South Portland, Maine

I was warned by Roadfood expert Dale Fine that only tourists go to Red’s Dairy Freeze. Locals never go there. (Well, our friends, the Breuls, go there often. On the other hand, they’ve only lived in Maine a couple of years, so do they qualify as locals?). Anyway, since I was a tourist in Maine, I felt bound to bow to popular demand from our group and go to Red’s.

Red’s is very popular. It’s been around since 1952, almost as long as I, and there always seems to be a line, even though road construction makes it an adventure to get there.

Red’s serves vanilla, chocolate, and vanilla-chocolate swirl soft-serve ice cream, but they can turn those simple ingredients into 20 different flavored sundaes, 36 flavors of milkshake, and 16 different Nor’Easters. They also serve slushes, drinks, and novelties (ice cream sandwiches and the like.)

I went with a Nor’Easter, which involves mixing candy with the ice cream. I chose snickers, the world’s greatest candy bar. I was tempted to go with cookie dough since the CDC advises against ever eating cookie dough, even in ice cream, which is the sort of thing that makes me rebellious. But the CDC will always be with us, and while you can always get cookie dough ice cream, a snickers blend is relatively rare.

I have to say that Dale Fine was right. Red’s blends the candy with the ice cream in a feckless manner. They barely stir it in. The Nor’Easter is a sharp contrast to the excellent Dairy Queen Blizzard. The Blizzard thoroughly blends the candy (I recommend Heath Bar unless they offer German Chocolate Cake) with the ice cream so that the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.

In fairness, I ordered the Kiddie size Nor’Easter, which comes in a small plastic cup (9 ounces, $2.90), and it may be that a larger size in a sturdier cup would allow a more powerful stir. Continuing with fairness, everyone else loved theirs. (I mean, it’s ice cream. We all scream for ice cream.)

I ate all of mine, of course, and the trip was redeemed by the opportunity to chat with an Auburn graduate who had wandered into Maine. After a modicum of trash talk, I gave her a friendly “War Eagle,” to which she responded, “You’ll never get me to say, ‘Roll Tide!'” Hah! Gotcha!

Back to the ice cream, my view is that if you fall off a horse or if you get indigestion from that third barbecue sandwich, you need to get back on the horse right away and immediately have another sandwich, although you shouldn’t try both at the same time. I certainly would go back to Red’s, but I would order a milk shake. I’m confident that they really blend those, and I see that they offer a German Chocolate shake. Go for it.

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