Free Greater's Ice Cream by Robin Davis Heigel Page A

features, including Italian marble mosaics and a riverboat deck, as well as its tribute to Reds’ history.
    The Cincinnati Bengals, who had shared Riverfront with the Reds, got their own new football stadium down the street: Paul Brown Stadium, named for the team’s original owner.Paul Brown holds sixty-five thousand people. The Astroturf of Riverfront has been replaced with FieldTurf, an artificial surface that more closely mimics natural grass. The Bengals, who went to the Super Bowl twice in the ’80s, have yet to win the World Championship.
    Through the decades, Cincinnati has also developed its own food culture, including Skyline Chili, which started in 1949 and serves its thin chili (with more aromatic spices than fiery heat) over spaghetti or on hot dogs topped with a cyclone of thinly shredded cheddar cheese. La Rosa’s Pizza, with its sweet tomato sauce and crispy crust, started in 1954 and has become an institution, as has Montgomery Inn, known for its fall-from-the-bone, sweet-smoky barbecued ribs. The restaurant started in Montgomery north of Cincinnati in 1951 and now has a location on the Ohio River downtown, as well as one in nearby Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, and Dublin, a suburb of Columbus. (By the way, Montgomery Inn serves Graeter’s Ice Cream for dessert.)
    Through it all, the Queen City has remained home to Graeter’s Ice Cream, one of the oldest family-owned ice cream businesses in the country.
    The company still offers eight “original flavors,” including black cherry, coffee, strawberry and butter pecan, and a handful of sorbet flavors, such as strawberry. In addition, Graeter’s makes ten of its ever-popular chocolate chip flavors, including Buckeye Blitz, toffee chocolate chip and, of course, the customer favorite, black raspberry chocolate chip. Seasonal flavors such as pumpkin, cinnamon, peach and tangerine rotate in and out during certain months.
    The retail stores continue to offer many of the same sodas, milkshakes and sundaes they’ve made for nearly one hundred years. Now there’s also a signature sundae commemorating the company’s history: the 1870 Tower. It features a chocolate bundt cake filled with hot fudge and a scoop of black raspberry chocolate chip ice cream, drizzled with more hot fudge and then topped off with whipped cream, chopped pecans and a cherry.

    The oldest Graeter’s store in Cincinnati sits on Hyde Park Square. Courtesy of Ken Heigel .

    The West Chester store combines the new look and feel with the same old-fashioned charm. Courtesy of Ken Heigel .
    In the Cincinnati area, Graeter’s Ice Cream has fourteen retail stores. In Kentucky there are fourteen stores plus two in Indiana, owned by two franchises. The Columbus area has eleven stores, plus another four that the same franchise opened in Dayton. One Columbus store and two Dayton locations are housed in the same building as another Ohio favorite: City Barbecue.
    In all, there are a total of forty-five retail operations, plus its ever-expanding online business. In recent years, Graeter’s Ice Cream has also started dabbling in social media, including Twitter and Facebook, which has a fan page with more than fifty-five thousand fans and encourages customers to post photos of the biggest chocolate chips they’ve found in the ice cream.
    Going forward, Graeter’s Ice Cream, like any small family business, will be beset with challenges. One of them, however, is not the recession that hit the country hard in 2008. “I think it’s been so dramatic,” said Richard Graeter, fourth generation and current CEO of the company, “but it has not affected us dramatically.”
    Louisville franchisee Jim Tedesko agrees. “The recession in a sense helped our business. In 2009, we had our best year ever,” he said. Tedesko suspects it was because consumers were willing to spend a little extra money on good ice cream that had the added bonus of