This is absolutely the San Franciscan in me coming out, because it’s not at all the way I was raised, but I typically assume that if food is uniquely good then there’s also going to be something uniquely compelling about the aesthetic of the restaurant that serves it. I guess that once upon a time it was cool to find an out of the way restaurant and then declare that, even though it looks just like every other restaurant of its type, this restaurant happens to be the best Thai restaurant in town, or something. But that’s not how things are anymore. Nowadays, good = interesting-looking. Sometimes an interesting look even substitutes for goodness (looking at you, Four Barrel coffee).

So imagine my surprise when I got some soft-serve ice cream out of an incredibly unassuming, unmarked, unbranded white van at the Baltimore Book Festival and took one bite and discovered that it was the most amazing ice cream I have ever tasted in my life. I mean, seriously, it is impossible to describe how good this ice cream was. For this last weekend, I have basically oriented my life around this ice cream. It’s like the BBF no longer exists in my memory, this is just the week where I had the great ice cream

But, anyway, as a joke I went around telling people: “This ice cream is so amazing that I, like, wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that there were drugs in it. Like if someone came up to me and was like, ‘actually, there is opium in this ice cream,’ then I’d be like, ‘You know, that actually makes more sense than this ice cream just randomly being super good.’”

Anyway, cut to the very end of the Book Festival, where an acquaintance comes up to me and he’s also eating the ice cream and I say, “Isn’t that ice cream amazing?”

And he says, “Yeah, I had to get some before the book festival ended; this is illegal in Baltimore, but the truck is from Pennsylvania and apparently they don’t know that you’re not allowed to serve ice cream that’s loaded with transfats.”

=/