Bender's doesn't anything else going for it—certainly not more favorable coverage from area blogs such as this.  But as an admitted ice cream snob who intends to live out his golden years with an ugly concoction of diabetes and liver disease, news that Bender's is now turning out sundae's in tater tot trays for five bucks is impossible to pass up.  And just look at that thing: delicious ice cream that comes from a 5 gallon tub, melty in all the right places, and oozing with chocolate syrup.  Plus, for those of you who aspire to die of heart failure, they'll cover it in bacon bits at no extra cost.

No word as to how long you'll be able to score this, but it looked like there was a mess of ice cream in the fridge.

Perhaps I'm just oblivious, but I've never once laid eyes upon such a brilliant marriage of sugar and sugar.  I'm just shocked no one thought to combine the sale of these two types of treats before; it's just such an obvious merger, like putting KFC and Taco Bell under the same roof.

Also, I apologize for the shirtless dude wearing a cowboy hat that made it into the shot.

I found myself in Santa Cruz the other weekend, eating a fat bowl of Marianne's ice cream at 11 in the morning when it hit me: San Francisco ice cream sucks.  In fact, whenever I dive into a waffle cone in other cities, I find myself wondering where San Francisco went wrong.

That's not to say San Francisco doesn't have any good ice cream.  Anyone who claims Mitchell's sucks, especially when it's done up as a sundae at St. Francis, is a damn fool.  Berkeley Farms is pretty legit for an ice cream that's stored next to frozen pizzas in- Safeway.  And It's-Its are the retired jersey of ice cream sandwiches: untouchable.  But the bulk of the ice creameries in SF just don't cut it.

Let's consider this graph:

In short: most SF ice cream is pretentious, some of it is good, much of it is only marginally better than dog feces, and I have too much time on my hands.

I don't mean SF ice cream is pretentious as in you see people gripping their cones with their pinky sticking out in the air and holding a monocle to their eye.  Rather, it's more about how needlessly 'weird' our ice creameries are.  Would a 6-year-old eat Humphry Slocombe's balsamic vinaigrette ice cream?  No, because it tastes like ass.  This is the beauty of children: they come with absolutely no pretenses.  Kids won't eat something because it was 'creative' or challenging to make; they eat what tastes rad.  Any child that finds themself tugging at their mom's hips for a scoop of “Boccalone Prosciutto” has clearly lived in this town for far too long.

So what the fuck is up? Why is San Francisco a decent ice cream black hole?  I'm no expert on this subject, I cannot help but feel the Straus base is to blame.  Something about locally-sourced, organic ingredients appears to make ice cream makers lose their goddamn mind and start filling their scoops with shit that just doesn't belong in ice cream.  Whereas Mitchell's and Marianne's is just a delicious concoction of sugar mixed with candy and other flavoring agents, Humphry Slocombe, Bi-Rite and Xanath mix goose liver and olive oil into their ice cream and caters to people who think eating food on the sidewalk is a “movement.”

Why can't I just find a place that will serve me 5 scoops of moose tracks in this town?  It's keeping me up at night.

(Marianne's photo by Liralen Li)