If I’m being honest, I’ve never really loved milkshakes. Sure, I’ll have one every once and a while, but I’ve never found myself craving one, and I’ll always rather have a water ice.
As summer gets closer, though, it’s officially frozen desert season, and I realized that I haven’t experienced much variety in the milkshake department. Other than frosties at Wendy’s, which aren’t really milkshakes if you think about it, I barely know what’s available.
What if the perfect one is out there, and I just don’t know it yet? With that in mind, I set out to try a few staples of the milkshake world.
In order to judge fairly, I ordered chocolate (or chocolate-adjacent) milkshakes at each store. Sorry to Rita’s and Baskin Robbins, who didn’t quite make the list. I would have tried them as well, but turns out there is a limit to how many milkshakes one can consume in a week.
5: Dairy Queen: 5/10
5031 Pennell Rd., Aston, PA or 747 Sproul Rd., Spingfield, PA
Starting off with a Hot Fudge milkshake from the royalty of the kind-of-frozen dairy industry, I was a bit disappointed. As someone with a mom from the midwest, I’ve heard plenty about how great Dairy Queen is, but I’d never actually been.
It was decent, but I wouldn’t choose it over other milkshakes if given the choice. It was more liquidy than I would have preferred. The chocolate flavor was subtle, which was nice, but as the drink went on it got a bit bland. The whipped cream on top was a nice touch, but overall the drink sits at a middling 5/10 because it wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t that great.
4: Renatos: 7/10
8 Park Ave., Swarthmore, PA
The black and white shake from Renato’s was a pretty good milkshake. It was more of a classic milkshake, and it pulled off classic well, which didn’t surprise me. It tasted a bit like the Dairy Queen, but the drink had more substance.
The only reason I didn’t rank it higher was because there was some uneven consistency which distracted from the actual drink. However, it did get brownie points for its convenient location, right in the heart of Swarthmore.
3: Nifty Fifty’s: 8/10
1900 MacDade Boulevard, Folsom, PA
Nifty Fifty’s chocolate cookie dough came so, so close to first place. The chocolate flavour was rich, but the chocolate chips on top and the cookie dough chunks at the bottom provided enough variety to keep the chocolate from being too much. The milkshake was pretty thick, so I would recommend grabbing a spoon for this one, and the chocolate flavour tasted pretty intense as well, which almost drowned out the flavour of the cookie dough.
2: Scooped: 9/10
25 W State St, Media, PA
Scooped was a bit of an underdog, but it ended up being delicious. After ordering a chocolate shake, I watched the ice cream get scooped into a blender and blended up, before being handed over the counter. It tasted fittingly freshly made, living up to the establishment’s name, and, ironically, after the other milkshakes, it almost felt healthy.
If a milkshake is ice cream in liquid form, this one reflected that best. It was a no muss, no fuss, classic milkshake, and even though I’d never had it before, it tasted familiar, like a warm summer evening in just the right way.
1: Dairy Cottage: 9.5/10
328 West Woodland Avenue, Springfield, PA
I was not expecting to place a milkshake from a place I’d never heard of in Springfield in first place, but after tasting the chocolate milkshake, I realized I had no other choice.
It was a dark chocolate milkshake with more bitter undertones, and it had the perfect consistency, not too thick for a straw, but not runny enough to subtract from the milkshakiness. It was satisfying to drink and a nearly perfect milkshake.
Infobox reporting by Cayla Gaffney ’29
