CHILL OUT

Everyone’s favorite snow cone place closed, but you can still “freeze” the day

BY RACHEL STONE | PHOTOS BY KATHY TRAN

hen Aunt Stelle’s snow cone stand announced this year that they’re closed for good, it ended more than 50 years of an Oak Cliff tradition.

An Aunt Stelle’s snow cone was the taste of summer itself. Waiting in line with friends and neighbors, standing on the asphalt and eating it with sticky fingers. Aunt Stelle’s was just so Oak Cliff. But it’s gone, and it’s not coming back. So now what? We offer these candidates for a new generation of summertime frozen treats.

hile there is only one Aunt Stelle’s, there are plenty of places to get a snow cone in Oak Cliff.

Located in a shopping center on Kiest just south of Hampton, Jafan Snowcones doesn’t have a sign. But it’s next to the catfish place.

This shop, which has been open five years, only sells snow cones, and it has a dizzying menu of flavors.

There are the typical cherry, grape and lime, plus mixes such as tiger’s blood, pink lady and hulk (that’s grape, green apple and pineapple). Some flavors have no food dye, such as “clear cherry.”

Jafan Snowcones

2460 W. Kiest Blvd.

Noon-9 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 1-8 pm. Sunday-Monday

Owner and operator Alma Vallejo also comes up with custom blends, which include the Obama (blue Hawaiian) and Michelle (strawberry daiquiri).

These snow cones are made with fine shaved ice and come drenched in syrup so there’s not that drained ice at the top. The place is no frills, lacking décor and tables. You’ll find yourself eating yours out on the front sidewalk with other snow cone-heads. In that way, it is reminiscent of Aunt Stelle’s, and it’s close enough to Kiest Park that it might be possible to get there before your ice melts.

Also Try

Water Boy, the water store that serves snacks and frozen treats. Here you can buy hot Cheetos covered in nacho cheese, a scoop of Blue Bell ice cream, a mango smoothie or a rainbow snow cone topped with sour gummies.

Water Boy

2645 S. Hampton Road 10 a.m.-9:30 p.m. every day tephen Smith always wanted to open a chocolate shop.

But by the time he got the financing together, there were already two chocolatiers operating in Oak Cliff — CocoAndré and Dude, Sweet Chocolate.

There weren’t any locally owned ice cream shops after Carnival Barker’s closed, so last summer he opened Betty Ringer Ice Cream at Sylvan Thirty.

Smith previously owned Nib Chocolates, holds a degree from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and has worked in Michelinstarred restaurants.

All of the ice cream at Betty Ringer is made from scratch.

Most places whose ice cream is made in-house use pre-made bases, but not here.

“It’s expensive, and it’s more work,” Smith says of making the base.

Besides that, it prevents him from selling wholesale unless he buys a multi-thousand-dollar pasteurizing machine. Even though everything in the ice cream is pasteurized, Texas requires pasteurization at the end, unless you’re using a pre-made base.

Anyway, this truly scratch-made ice cream is worth the $4 per scoop.

The flavors change all the time, but there’s always a cookie flavor (cookies and cream is in high demand and often sells out quickly). And there’s always a tea flavor because Smith is a tea-drinker, so he makes up flavors based on things he likes from the Cultured Cup. There’s always vanilla, which is used to make shakes and floats.

And there’s always a vegan flavor.

“The vegan ice cream is a work in progress,” he says. “It’s hard to get the texture just right.”

But he’s getting close after experimenting with pea-shoot milk.

Creative flavors Smith has concocted include Oaxacan spice, raspberry lemonade (that’s raspberry sorbet swirled with lemon ice cream), banana pudding and blueberry/lavender/honey.

Betty Ringer has atmosphere — bright paint colors and café tables — and there are places to sit outside.

It’s open year round, regardless of the outside temperature, and it’ll be open seven days a week starting in June.

Betty Ringer Ice Cream

750 Fort Worth Ave.

Noon-9 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, noon-6 p.m. Sunday, closed Monday

Two More Places To Try

Paletería Nevería

539 W. Jefferson Blvd.

Paletería

Nevería is the place for those of us who still miss bygone La Michoacana in the Bishop Arts District. They serve house-made ice creams in flavors such as strawberry cheesecake and coconut, plus juices, fruit cups, antojitos and sandwiches.

Azucar

azucaricecream.com on’t forget to support your neighborhood paletero. When it’s 90 degrees, and you see him or her pedaling or pushing a cart up and down the hills of Oak Cliff, buy two. Buy three. Heck, buy the guy out and make some friends.

Miami-based Azucar comes to Oak Cliff this summer. The popular Little Havana ice cream shop is expected to open in the Nazerian family’s Bishop Arts Village on Bishop at Ninth soon.

From Paletería la Mexicana to Frutería Cano, there is no shortage of places to buy a Mexican popsicle in Oak Cliff.

But these two are really special.

Former Richards Group executive Diana Díaz started Encanto Pops with her sisters in 2016.

They learned the craft from an uncle who has a paletería outside of Chicago, and their place is adorable.

Popsicle flavors include cucumber/ lime/jalapeño, watermelon/hibiscus, strawberries and cream, and café de olla.

Picolé Pops opened in the Bishop Arts District last year.

It’s the concept from two brothers, Adrian and Andrés Lara, whose grandfather owned Manhattan Paletas in Mexico City. They were inspired by the ice cream flavors on a trip to Brazil for the FIFA World Cup in 2014.

Fruity or creamy flavors include açai, hibiscus, avocado and peanut butter. The can also come filled, such as banana with Nutella, passion fruit with condensed milk and mint with chocolate ganache. Any of them can be dipped in chocolate and sprinkled with unlimited toppings such as nuts or crushed Oreos for $1.

Encanto Pops

831 W. Davis St.

Noon-8 p.m. every day

Picolé Pops

415 W. Davis

Noon-9 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, noon-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday hile snow cones abound, there is only one New Orleansstyle snowball place in Oak Cliff. There’s a difference.

Maureen Ehrlicher opened NOLAsnoballs at Jefferson Tower last summer.

Ehrlicher and her husband, David, are from New Orleans, but they’ve lived in Oak Cliff for 27 years.

“I grew up with four kids in the family, and we weren’t rich by any means,” Maureen Ehrlicher says. “But we could always afford to go out and get a snowball.”

Snowball ice is fluffier than the crunchier ice of a snow cone. NOLAsnoballs employs a New Orleans-made Southern Snow machine to get that authentic effect.

They have a few dozen flavors, including four that are sugar free and three — cherry, pineapple and raspberry — that are made from real fruit.

Cream flavors, such as dreamsicle and pink passion, have evaporated milk in the syrup. The chocolate flavor is made with Hershey’s syrup, just like in New Orleans.

Ehrlicher says she and her middle daughter used to go to Aunt Stelle’s “all the time.”

NOLAsnowballs

“In fact, the first time I went, I ordered a chocolate, and she said, ‘You must be from New Orleans because nobody orders that flavor,’ ” Ehrlicher recalls.

345 W. Jefferson

1-9 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 2-8 p.m. Sunday, closed Monday

But she says she’s won a few converts to chocolate snowballs since opening her own place.

Ehrlicher has adapted the menu to include requests such as pickle flavor. She now offers a pickle-juice snowball with chopped pickles on top. Call it New Or’cliff.

The stand is open all year as long as the temperature is over 50 degrees. And really, it’s OK to call it a snow cone.

“I don’t care what you call it as long as you come in and try it,” Ehrlicher says.

Kidd Springs Park pool opens June 2 for the final season in its current form. A $4.5-million renovation is expected to begin in late fall or early next year. When it’s finished, by summer 2020, Kidd Springs will have a six-lane lap pool and a separate pool with flume slides and a jungle gym, plus a 3,000-square-foot bathhouse with showers and dressing rooms. Shoreline and dam improvements at the Kidd Springs lake are nearing completion.

The luxury of Dallas’ bulk and trash collection practices could come to an end soon. Currently the city’s sanitation department will pick up almost anything residents put on the curb during monthly combined bulk and brush days. Dallas City Council on June 6 will consider a new system that would cut bulky trash pick up to four times a year but also result in citywide brush and yard waste recycling. Leaves and yard clippings, picked up monthly, would have to be bagged in paper or other compostable yard bags, no plastic. The city also plans to improve its on-demand bulky trash pickup service, where residents can get estimates by phone or online and be charged on their water bills. Besides that, more bulky trash dropoff centers could be added. Changing the system could eventually save the city as much as $1 million a year, but more important, it will keep tons of trash out of the city-owned McCommas Bluff Landfill. As much as 90,000 tons of brush and yard waste could be diverted from the landfill every year. Those materials could be turned into mulch that’s given away to Dallas residents.

It’s no longer free to ride the Oak Cliff streetcar. City Council in April approved creating a $1 fee to ride each way. Dallas Area Rapid Transit thinks the fare will bring in about $133,000 a year in revenue; the streetcar costs about $2.1 million a year to operate. But the decision to create a fare was about fairness to all transit riders in Dallas, not profit.

The Coombs Creek Trail will reach from Beckley Avenue to Bahama Drive in the next couple of years. The Dallas City Council recently approved spending $7.2 million to bring the Kessler Park trail to Beckley Avenue and the Interstate 30 pedestrian bridge. Another $2.2 million will go to extending the trail from Hampton at Plymouth up to Fort Worth Avenue at Bahama Drive. That project, connecting the trail from Hampton Road to Fort Worth Avenue, will create bike lanes on Bahama between Plymouth and Fort Worth Avenue and along Fort Worth Avenue from Bahama to Interstate 30. Sidewalks will be widened along Bahama and the trail will be extended along Plymouth from Hampton to Bahama. It is funded 80 percent from regional toll revenue funds and 20 percent from the Fort Worth Avenue TIF fund. Construction on that part could begin in March 2019 and be completed in September 2019. The project to bring the trail about 1.5 miles from Kessler Parkway to the Interstate 30 pedestrian bridge will include building a 12-foot-wide trail. This Kessler Park part of the project could begin in July 2020, with construction taking about a 10 months.

Bishop Dunne Catholic School

Contact: Charleen Doan at 214.339.6561 ext. 4020 or admission@bdcs.org

A co-educational, college preparatory school serving students in grades 6-12. We provide a strong faith and valuebased education with high academic standards, encouraging all students to achieve their full potential. Our curriculum emphasizes individualized attention, and is constantly at the forefront of technology integration through the use of laptops, ebooks, and our Online Education Program. Additionally, we provide a full range of extracurricular activities ranging from athletics, to the arts, to clubs and service organizations.

Restaurant Roundup

Neighborhood resident Adam Loew recently opened a restaurant in Elmwood called Grassroots Kitchen. The restaurant, at 2109 S. Edgefield, offers bahn mi sandwiches, meatloaf, jerk chicken and more on a frequently changing menu. Loew and his wife, Thania, make everything from scratch. Loew manned a smoker and pop-up food stand outside of North Oak Cliff Beer and Wine every Friday and Saturday for three years before opening this brickand-mortar location.

You like tacos. You like wine. Here’s a restaurant that pairs tacos with wine. It’s called Taco y Vino and was expected to open in the Bishop Arts District at the end of May. Wine professional Jimmy Contreras, who lives in Oak Cliff, is partnering with chef Sharon Van Meter for the concept, which will offer a selection of tacos, quesadillas and desserts along with wine pairings.

A family friendly coffee and smoothies bar opened in the Bishop Arts District recently. Real estate agent Brad Lambert and his wife, Kim, bought the cottage one door down from the Wild Detectives as an investment. But then they decided to open their own place there. The cafe, Serve , offers coffee drinks and smoothie bowls of acai or matcha with fruit, granola and nuts. The Lamberts, who have three young children, wanted the space to be family friendly. So they installed turf in the backyard for a play area. They’re planning to offer “mommy and me” yoga on Saturday mornings as well as occasional craft workshops on the building’s wrap-around front porch. A Rhode Island-based restaurant that hires people with special needs has leased a space at Sylvan Thirty. Shayna’s Place Cafe is a family owned sandwich and coffee shop. Lou Olerio is opening Shayna’s Dallas location. His uncle started the restaurant in 2015, inspired by his daughter Shayna who has Down syndrome. The restaurant is expected to open next to Cibo Divino in late summer. They’ll serve breakfast, lunch and dinner including sandwiches, salads, smoothies, pastries and juices as well as coffee, beer and wine.

A meat market and steakhouse opened recently at Sylvan Thirty. Cooper’s Meat Market’s original location opened in San Antonio in 1997. Michael Johnson, the son of Cooper’s San Antonio owners, lives in Oak Cliff and owns this store. Along with cut-to-order beef, pork, poultry and fish, Cooper’s also offers appetizers, sides, casseroles, wine and beer. It’s also a 50-seat steakhouse with executive chef Kenny Mills, who previously has worked at Chop House Burger, Capital Grille, Sullivan’s Steakhouse and Dallas Chop House. Catering also is available.

Worship

By BRENT MCDOUGAL