Mitchell's
Ice cream, immigration, and a long, inefficient wander
A teacher told me the other day that he told his students if he ever ran into them at Mitchell’s, he’d buy them their ice cream. For the rest of the week, I had Mitchell’s on the mind.
For readers not in the know, Mitchell’s is a San Francisco institution, an ice cream parlor that opened in the 1950s and is now famous for its tropical flavors — they were doing ube before it was cool. The grocery store near my house sells half-gallons of Mitchell’s. Once in a blue moon, they will have grasshopper pie, which is their best flavor, or peanut butter indulgence, which is also their best flavor. But usually the grocery store only seems to carry inexplicably unseasonal flavors like eggnog and pumpkin. Also rum raisin, which I believe is not something anyone actually eats (let me know in the comments if you’re a rum-raisin-head!).
I had Mitchell’s on the mind and knew going to the grocery store was useless, so I proposed to Andy that we walk to the Mitchell’s store. “That’s like five miles!” he said. “It’s only like three,” I said. The days are long now, and we didn’t have anything else going on that evening, so I eventually convinced him to go on the journey.
Looking to avoid going up too many steep hills, we started meandering south and east, strolling past old Victorians. The bougainvillea was in full bloom, which Andy and I are both suckers for, so I kept stopping to take pictures. Andy found his dream combo — bougainvillea stacked on top of a fragrant jasmine bush. Look how happy he was!
We reached Divisadero and I realized we’d overshot a bit and had no choice but to climb the last bit of it and turn onto the top of Castro street. I firmly believe that inefficiency on these walks is part of the point. Meandering in the general direction of a place and not in a straight line allows you to stumble on beautiful things, like the bougainvillea/jasmine combo, or this striking green house on Divisadero:
We continued up Castro, walking past the edge of Corona Heights Park, a small and steep park with fantastic views of the city, and made our way down to Market Street.
At this point, it was time for a break, so we ducked into Antoine’s Cookie Shop, which bakes Steph Curry’s favorite snickerdoodle. This is not to be confused with Anthony’s Cookies in the Mission, which I prefer, but Antoine’s chocolate chip cookie was still pretty good. (And yes having a cookie on the way to get ice cream was absolutely necessary because we ended up climbing almost 500 ft. uphill!)
We turned down Dolores Street, passing a building Andy lived in for a few months, the bay window of his former bedroom now filled with an alarming number of frog plushies. We passed Mission Dolores, the oldest building in San Francisco and one of two graveyards in the city (to find out what happened to the rest of the graveyards, read my post on Colma). Andy told me he’d never been to Mission Dolores, a place visited by tens of thousands of people every year and located in the neighborhood where he lived for the majority of his time in San Francisco.
That’s the funny thing about living in a very touristy city — if you live in one, you often don’t do the touristy stuff. The stuff people travel thousands of miles and pay good money to see. And I shouldn’t judge Andy because I’ve also not done all of the touristy things. For example, I’ve never been inside Coit Tower. But I watched the fog and clouds swirling around it from the top of the UESF building in North Beach, pacing back and forth across the roof as I talked on the phone during their strike. Looking up through the mist at Coit was so jarringly beautiful and instantly calming and someday I’ll go in it, but I think that experience is enough to hang on to for a while.
We turned off Dolores and onto Guerrero. It was the golden hour, which this time of year seem to stretch on forever; the sun glows off our white and pastel city and the buildings are luminous. One of the Victorians had a golden setting (or rising?) sun painted on the second story and it was lit up as though hit by a spotlight. Sun on sun.
Guerrero is a wide, four lane, traffic-choked street that’s surprisingly delightful when you’re outside of a car. There are lots of quirky houses with surprising gardens and unexpected decorations, like this Christmas house.
Guerrero kind of turns into San Jose Avenue, which is where Mitchell’s is. A block or so before Mitchell’s, we came across a riotous, out-of-control bougainvillea that spanned the sidewalk, forcing us to crouch down to walk through the flowers. A rather magical portal to ice cream.
We were pretty far south in the city so the fog had rolled in and the temperature dropped, but ice cream fanatics were undeterred. I got an ice cream sandwich made with peanut butter indulgence ice cream in the middle. Perfection.
The Mitchell’s story is over 100 years old, when Noe Valley used to be dairy farms. The Mitchell family had a dairy farm in the late 1800s, which they eventually sold and built the apartment building where Mitchell’s is today. Two Mitchell brothers decided to try their hand at ice cream making and opened up the shop in the 1950s. In 1965, a customer who was a fruit importer suggested they try making mango ice cream, which has been on the menu ever since. The brothers expanded into making more tropical fruit flavors, which became a hit after a large influx of Filipino immigrants came to San Francisco. This influx was due to the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965, a victory from the civil rights movement. Before the Act, racist quotas were in place for immigration that essentially banned anyone from Asia or Africa or really anywhere outside of Northern or Western Europe from immigrating to the US. The Act lifted the quota and created a new system of immigration to America. In 1960, only 95 people immigrated to the US from the Philippines. In 1970, that number rose to 23,951. Many of those folks came to San Francisco, and Mitchell’s tapped into a whole new market by offering ube and buko and langka ice cream flavors. An unexpected connection between immigration policy and the longevity and success of an iconic San Francisco ice cream parlor.
The cold and foggy weather didn’t keep my ice cream sandwich from melting and I got quite a few drips on my coat as we walked over to Church street. We ended up walking over five miles, so Andy’s estimate turned out to be right, but that’s because of the aforementioned tendency to meander in the general direction, turning down streets based on the size of the hill or if we see something interesting or we don’t want to wait at a light. We ramble and that always means the journey is a bit longer.
The ramble is the point. Capital is pushing all of us to become more efficient in every aspect of our lives — from workouts to work. And I suppose I reject using AI for the same reason that I reject taking the direct route when I’m walking somewhere. A little bit of inefficiency allows room for serendipity, for day dreaming, for thinking. For reclaiming our time and our brains. It feels almost grandiose to say it, but allowing our minds and our feet to wander keeps us human. Plus sometimes there’s ice cream at the end.
Never made it to Mitchell's, next time
Love the bougainvillea!