Crushing on Oberlin’s New Ice Cream Sandwich Shop

by Sloane Dibari, Editor-in-Chief

Despite its consistent glut of specialized dining options—fresh Thai cuisine, latenight pizza, gazillion-dollar burgers you only eat when your divorced psychiatrist father is in town—for years Oberlin suffered a glaring deficit in the most universally coveted food group: cold treats. This summer, though, our prayers were finally answered when Crush Lovable Ice Cream Sandwiches came to deliver us from wildly marked up pints of Ben & Jerry’s from DeCafé, the depressing point at which a honeydew Melona from Kim’s just doesn’t hit the same, the 10-minute drive to Zoey’s Shake Shack or— God forbid—Dairy Queen.

Crush started out as professional baker Matthew Uhl’s food truck. It became a staple at outdoor events around town, charming the good citizens of Oberlin so profoundly that Uhl and his wife/co-manager Shannon Caperton were able to open a brick-andmortar shop downtown. It’s the kind of small-town success story you’d read about in the local paper to feel a little bit better about the world.

Crush is tucked into a niche adjacent to the public library parking lot; you might just miss it (and the “metaphysical shop” next door that, somehow, none of you people had told me about) on your next stroll down South Main. Inside, the shop is cute as a damn button. The walls are painted a tasteful robin’s egg blue. The menu above the counter provides pleasant black, white, and pink accents. Atop the clean, white tile floor, a set of spotless tables and chairs are arranged in the subtly off-kilter way characteristic of the (decidedly grimier) mom-and-pop ice cream shops in the trashy beach towns of my childhood day trips.

So, when I first stepped into Crush, I felt like I’d been there a million times before, as if I were dreaming a sublime amalgamation of every dessert retailer I’d ever patronized. I think they might have been playing “Sweet Home Alabama,” but that could have also been a memory from the seasonal ice cream stand on a farm in my rural hometown, years ago.

Contrary to its full Christian name, Crush offers various other refreshments: $4 drinks (including the chic-sounding hibiscus lemonade) you can customize with fruit-flavored syrups, treats that range from tried-and-true scoops of Toft’s ice cream to Uhl’s homemade cookies to whatever a Crush Bowl is. But, as one tends to be when trying a new restaurant with a signature gimmick, I was there for Crush’s specialty: a custom ice cream sandwich for nine American dollars.

All you need to do to create your dream sando is choose your cookies (top and bottom), then your scoop of ice cream, then your toppings. The cookie selection is especially creative: chocolate chip for normies, honey lemon for anti-chocolate contrarians, Funfetti for all of our #innerchildren, to name a few. Most of the 14 ice cream offerings are pretty normal, save for Toft’s-exclusive flavors like Muddy’s Sea Salt Slam and Lake Erie Cookie Island Monster. The toppings, aside from the trendy Fruity Pebbles, are also pretty normal. Per the menu’s “Step 4” column, if you’re “crushed”—what a disarmingly affecting descriptor!—you might ask to have your sandwich warmed up.

I once practically sprinted out of a Crumbl Cookies in a Buffalo strip mall because I was so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of saccharine sloptions (totally sober!). Despite my initial Crumbl-flavored anxieties, Crush would prove to be different. Their menu is eclectic enough to feel impressive yet modest enough for each option to feel substantive—meaningful, even.

This is refreshing in an America overrun with high-concept build-your-own culinary establishments—the ever-expanding domain of Millennials and particularly doomed cuspers on either the Gen X or Gen Z side. Their cheuginess levels are off the charts.

Still, as a spiritually Millennial Gen Zer, I’ve been known to cheug out on occasion. My similarly Millennialesque girlfriend and I ordered a sandwich with peanut butter cookies, Lake Erie Cookie Island Monster ice cream, and rainbow sprinkles. It was a combination I would have put into a food-based personality quiz when I was 12, an elaborate fantasy I could once only taste through BuzzFeed.

The generous scoop of Lake Erie tasted strongly of blue food dye—which totally ruled, for your information. Few flavor profiles are better than Primary Color peppered with tactile chocolate chips and soft bits of cookie dough, plus top notes of Rainbow. Now imagine that bookended by salty, crunchy (but not crumbly) peanut butter cookies. It was heavenly. It went beyond satisfying my sweet tooth: I didn’t feel like eating anything remotely sweet again for several days, which is totally unlike me. I even took off my propeller hat and put down my giant rainbow lollipop for a while. I was a changed woman. Speaking as a penny-pinching curmudgeon, it was well worth my nine clams plus tip.

What makes Crush so special is that it transcends the inherent cheuginess of the high-concept build-your-own joint. Crush’s fashionable gimmick belies its profound warmth and earnestness, the kind you just don’t get from hyper-customizable, hyperreal chain fare: massive cups of 16 Handles candyslop (e.g., five sickening little plops of clashing froyo flavors topped with three varieties of popping boba and brownie chunks), Big Gulp-sized bastardizations of milk tea accessorized with Oreos, and, of course, the omnipresent Bowls of “meals” from Cava and the like. It’s no Playa Bowls (thank God), but just as keto fanatics suppress their basic human desire for carbohydrates with protein bars that are 80% stevia leaf extract, all of us slopheads just might stave off our cravings with a nice dessert from some nice people in a nice little town.

In a world of Crumbl Limited Edition Dubai Chocolate Matcha-flavored artifice (or whatever), Crush offers us not mere sloptions, but choices. You can choose to cheug, like I did, or you can order the classic combo of plain old chocolate chip cookies and vanilla ice cream. The world is yours, my friend. Go to Crush and get it.

This article is dedicated to our dearly graduated former staff writer, Sebastian Cruz, not as an attempt at filling his shoes but as a tribute to his pioneering of food criticism in the Grape.