Victorian gardens

Victorian gardens, inventive flavours, homemade everything You need to visit PEI’s dessert destination

BY SHELLEY CAMERON-MCCARRON

Before we go further, you should know that I stopped caring—about everything—with my first taste of key lime pie ice cream from Holman’s Ice Cream Parlour. I forgot all about minor family squabbles, our next destination, even this dreamy summer day, and focused in on the only thing that mattered: the otherworldly perfection of this moment.

Sinking into a red Adirondack chair in enchanting Victorian gardens, even the charms of this intoxicating setting momentarily disappeared for me as I focused all my attention and awareness on savouring this experience.

And my new addiction.

Holman’s, on Fitzroy Street in seaside Summerside, PEI’s second largest city, came as a revelation, a next-level dream.

Located inside a trim, green, stately two-storey Georgian-influenced heritage home known as the Holman Homestead, the building once served as a parsonage and later as the residence of R.T. Holman, one of PEI’s most prominent merchants in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Today, visitors are greeted by the warm scent of waffle cones, a roughly 80-year-old soda fountain, and 16 inventive ice cream flavours from Holman’s rotating roster of more than 100 decadent choices.

Along with scoops and scoops of ice cream, they serve milkshakes and floats and homemade waffles and desserts— even a wonderfully oddball “spaghetti” sundae comprised of vanilla ice cream, shaped as spaghetti, with strawberry sauce,

MILLICENT LEE PHOTOGRAPHY

MILLICENT LEE PHOTOGRAPHY

Top: classic banana split; right, above: Brye Caissie making a Brownie Explosion Waffle.

and shaved white chocolate topped with a Ferrero Rocher chocolate as “meatball.”

In season, Holman’s has a travelling cart that hits the road for destinations and festivals around the island. (Yes, I followed them on social media during my vacation on the Island. Yes, I had a heads-up on their planned route each day. Yes, I did a happy dance whenever their route happened to combine with mine. And, yes, I wondered how I’d cope when I had to go home.)

“We tell people we make it the way their grandmother used to make ice cream,” says Ken Meister, who with wife Jenny opened Holman’s in 2016, saving the historic home from demolition, and offering visitors a dessert destination where everything is made from scratch.

“It’s small-batch, handcrafted ice cream made with PEI ingredients,” says Meister.

Everything, he says, from their brownie bits to the cheesecake is homemade. In fact, the only prepacked item they buy is Oreo cookies.

Customers will have serious decisions to make—will it be a scoop of lemon curd blueberry ice cream or peppermint patty? Maybe it’ll be raspberry white chocolate swirl or the super popular honeycomb, a vanilla ice cream infused with bite-sized pieces of homemade sponge toffee, oh my!

Visitors can take their ice cream outside to enjoy in red Adirondack chairs positioned throughout one of the oldest, continually maintained Victorian style gardens in North America. Holman’s even stays open well into the evening with an outdoor fire pit to enjoy in the gardens.

The building itself dates to 1855, and along with the ice cream parlour, the Meister family operates Holman’s Heritage Suites in the historic home.

The setting is all part of the story of how they got into the ice cream business. After Meister retired from the air force in 2012 (his background is in operations), the family moved to Summerside to open a B&B.

Often, they’d walk by the site of the Holman’s building, then an antiques store, and it always reminded them of when they lived in Germany and their favorite local ice cream parlour, Eisparadies Penners, also located in a home with gardens. “We’d take all our visitors there, and ourselves too on a daily basis,” remembers Meister.

They often remarked on how the Holman Homestead would make a great ice cream parlour.

As time went on, the antique store closed, the building remained empty for a few years and eventually was slated for demolition. In summer 2015, a local historian called the Meisters, recipients of a heritage award for their B&B, to see if there was something they could do to save the place.

“Within days of that conversation, before we had a business plan…before we figured out how to make ice cream, we had signed an offer to purchase.”

Meister shakes his head now remembering how they’d jumped in blind.

“I don’t know what we were thinking,” he says, noting there were already a lot of ice cream places in PEI, they didn’t have experience in the ice cream business, and the house and gardens both needed a lot of work.

He says much blood, sweat and tears went into turning Holman’s, which is heading toward year-round operations (currently they close in January and February), into a thriving business.

“It’s more than just the ice cream, it’s the experience, to be able to step back in time,” he says.

As for him? What does he like about running an ice cream parlour?

“The number one thing I like about it is everybody’s happy. They’re excited and happy to see you.”