REVIEW

Here’s a plan for a perfect Jersey City day: dine on mofongo and pernil at the Puerto Rican restaurant ME Casa, stroll to the waterfront to admire the New York City skyline, then head over to Torico for some homemade tropical fruit ice cream.

Opened in 1968 by a Puerto Rican couple, Torico is still owned and operated by the Berrios family.

The Berrios, founders of Torico, originally opened a deli, but Peter’s tropical ice creams were so popular that the deli morphed into an ice cream shop. 46 years later Torico is still operated by Peter and Pura and their daughter Christine. It closed for renovations, which dragged on for almost two years, in 2010, and today the shop has a spiffy ice cream parlor ambiance.

The ice cream selection includes most of your mainstream, and not-so-mainstream, favorites (we very much enjoyed the pound cake ice cream), but it’s the unusual flavors, and the rich and creamy texture, that make Torico’s ice cream so distinctive. They specialize not only in the tropical fruits of Puerto Rico, but also ice cream flavors popular with their Filipino and Chinese customers.

Some of the most interesting include jackfruit, lychee, papaya, and a Filipino favorite known as ube, made from a purple yam. The sorbet flavors include guava, mango, passion fruit, soursop, and tamarind. On one visit the special of the day was black sesame! And rest assured that these are all made with the fruit, not artificial flavorings. Well, those blasted soft-serve flavorings are almost certainly fake, but you deserve what you get if you order them.

There are sundaes and toppings, of course, but we’d recommend, for a first visit anyway, you enjoy the stuff on a cone or in a dish.

LAF TRAK:

FOOD:

BEST THING TO EAT: Tropical fruit ice cream