A Tale of Two Shamrock Shakes ☘️

I tried to find one better than McDonald's. I ended up at home.

I am begging you guys to make ads like this again.

I went on an adventure this weekend. It began on Friday, when I dragged my friends from the bar at Casino, where we’d spent hours drinking martinis, with me to McDonald’s. We debated getting an Oreo Shamrock McFlurry (which I’m sure is delicious) but decided on just one Shamrock Shake for control purposes. It was the perfect, pale shade of green, so thick you can barely sip it at first, and very minty, though in that sweet, vanilla way.

I actually think three drinks deep is the perfect time to have a shake and fries at McDonald's.

Once it gets easy to sip is when you should stop, otherwise you will feel sick all night long. I know this because I do it every single year. This one was no exception. I healed my stomachache the way my Italian grandma taught me to — with wine. Specifically, a bottle of a delicious, tart rosé at Ten Bells. I don’t remember the name of it but maybe if you describe it like that they’ll know what it is. It looked like this:

I’d planned on spending the rest of the weekend trying different versions of the shake around the city. Some might add chocolate, I thought, others would opt for fresh mint in place of the chain’s “minty syrup”. This is not what happened, though it didn’t start off terribly.

The Minty at Brooklyn Farmacy

My neighborhood is perfect for many reasons, one of them being that it has a 15-year-old ice cream parlor called Brooklyn Farmacy in a 100-year-old building that used to be an actual pharmacy. It’s always packed with dates and groups of high schoolers and families eating banana splits with long sundae spoons, and this weekend, me, sipping a shake special called “The Minty". It was a chocolate peppermint milkshake, made with hot chocolate mix and topped with a swirl of very whipped, barely sweetened cream. When it arrived at the table, with it came a super cold sidecar of extra milkshake, which was a gift because it was delicious. I could have finished the entire glass. But it was a little thinner and icier than I wanted it to be, and it felt like something completely different than a Shamrock Shake, because it was actually just… a chocolate milkshake with mint.

orchardgrocer

A post shared by @orchardgrocer

The next place I went was somewhere I’d never stepped foot inside of before: Orchard Grocer. It’s a very small, completely vegan grocery store, but they also make fake egg sandwiches, swirl oat milk soft serve and sell things like Emma Chamberlain’s coffee brand and something called “soy curl chick’n salad”. I wasn’t in there long, not because those things really upset me, but because their soft serve machine was broken, and therefore the vegan version of a Shamrock Shake they were running as a special all weekend was no longer available. Maybe a guardian angel was looking out for me.

I was only a few blocks from Il Laboratorio del Gelato, where the exciting case of creamy gelato and tart sorbet always reminds me of a paint palette. Their milkshakes are apparently just “four large scoops of gelato” mixed with milk, and I thought their cool, herby fresh mint gelato would be a less saccharine but still delicious take on the classic. As I scanned the dozens of flavors, though, the only mint to be found was a citrusy yuzu mint and a strangely out of season bright pink peppermint stick.

I walked out of the shop, into the Sunday evening mist and surrendered — I had failed to find anything that could compete with my beloved seasonal shake. But it looks like Creamline, the burger restaurant inside of Chelsea Market started serving a whipped cream-topped and chewy Junior Mint-flecked shake today. Maybe that would have hit the spot. It’s made with the best milk in New York, after all. If Yellow Rose had been serving these $10 frozen grasshoppers last night, I probably would have gone home a lot happier. The whole search, though, inspired me to go on another, more general hunt for NYC’s best milkshakes. I’ll get that, and a map of the city’s best scoops & swirls of ice cream out before summer. If you have milkshake takes, please put them in the Perfect City chat.

It also inspired me to make what I had been hoping to find all weekend long for myself. I despise making smoothies at home — I hate cleaning my blender, they’re usually missing something I can’t place, I’d rather eat a bowl of blueberries and peanut butter than drink a glass of them, I could go on — but this weekend I made an exception. I also haven’t shared a recipe with you guys yet, but today I’m making an exception.

Desperate and disappointed, I did what any woman would do… make herself a Skinny Shamrock Shake. It’s sippable, but I don’t have straws at home, and I’m not sure why anyone would, so it’s also thick enough to eat with a spoon. It’s made with fresh mint and crunchy cacao nibs, and there’s a little bit of matcha in it, too, because the most important part of anything mint-flavored is that it’s green. It’s good in the morning after pilates and it’s good after dinner on the couch while I answer emails and rewatch Girls again.

SKINNY SHAMROCK SHAKE ☘️