I'm assuming this place is under new ownership and/or management since it was known as Scoops, but it exists in a lot of the same spaces online, so I'm not completely sure. They definitely renamed and revamped the place. They serve food and coffee, and their soft serve is one of our favorites. The fat content and the flavor are balanced just right, so it doesn't melt uniformly and it holds its shape, but without putting up a fight.
We went to Cloud Nine for the first time last year just in time for pumpkin season. We ordered milkshakes since we had to drive home, but we sampled the pumpkin soft serve, and it was so smooth we had to talk ourselves out of buying additional cones for the road. The milkshakes ended up being about as bad as they could be, like they were more milk than ice cream. It would be weird if they didn't know they gave us something bad as we were leaving with them.
The guy said they were going to try to stay open all winter if they got enough business, but they were closed weeks later before we could get more soft serve. Syracuse becomes a sad place in the winter when all the ice cream places close. All you really have on the north side is Carvel.
We're not in Cicero very often, but we were there repeatedly this past month. We were nearby stocking up on black raspberries and figured we'd stop in while we were close. Then we saw black raspberry ice cream and it felt like a sign. I don't normally go for fruity ice cream, so I almost passed up on it. They have it twisted with a raspberry sherbet flavor that's way too tart for my tastes. I would have tried it twisted with vanilla, but they wouldn't even do a half/half mix with black raspberry on top of vanilla. My girlfriend asked for a sample, and just like the pumpkin last year, it was perfect. Like I couldn't wrap my head around how I was enjoying black raspberry ice cream this much.
We both got straight black raspberry in cones with rainbow sprinkles. Whether or not they roll the sprinkles on the cone is like our only metric for soft serve assembly. It was sad to receive our cones with a small dusting of sprinkles that had been spooned on. That alone would have deterred us from coming back for regular soft serve, but they had us right where they wanted us here. For the next few weeks, we kept coming up with reasons to go to Cicero so we could get another cone here. We came there for lunch and had the exact same sandwiches I would have made during my lunch break at home. Their food isn't really an attraction, but we pretended it was so we could get more cones while we were there. We had a few different people serve us the ice cream, and the service never really got better. There's one guy there who doesn't even try to put the soft serve in cones, just puts it straight into a bowl and rests the cone on top. He said it's because it's too melty, but we had to wait for it to soften up before it was even worth eating with a spoon.
We didn't try any coffee drinks, because we assumed they wouldn't be worth it. Even if they don't improve anything else, we will continue to allow this place to let us down routinely as long as the soft serve stays as good as it is. read more