Banner readers said I overlooked this ice cream spot. Were they right?

I goofed. I’m sorry. I asked for this.

When I set out this summer to find the best ice cream in Prince George’s County, I trekked across strip malls, roadside stands and the University of Maryland campus to find the top treats.

As these things typically go, readers and devotees will go to bat for their favorite neighborhood gem or quibble with the order of the rankings. Seeing basically none of the latter, I’ll assume I hit a no-doubt home run in your hearts and minds.

But after soliciting you, dear readers, for other shops worthy of consideration, I got one resounding piece of feedback about the list: You forgot Franklins.

“Please try the ice cream shop inside [Franklins] restaurant in Hyattsville,” James P. wrote in the comments. “It’s the latest addition to [Franklins], and it’s delicious!”

Yes, it is.

In my search of spots high and low, I overlooked one of the newest entrants in the county’s ice cream game.

The Hyattsville restaurant-slash-brewery-slash-general store has been open at 5123 Baltimore Ave. since November 1993 and added another hyphenate in October when it opened an ice cream shop in the back of its retail store. Longtime customers might remember the business’ former deli sat where the treat parlor now resides.

General manager Marc Heckrotte and owner Mike Franklin chuckled when I sat with them this week to confess the error of my ways. They expressed gratitude that they’ve, perhaps unwittingly, rallied a mighty militia of ice cream fans for an idea that’s been percolating for years.

“I’ve always thought that like the two greatest things in the world are doughnuts straight out of the deep fryer and homemade ice cream,” Heckrotte, 58, said.

The Bowie resident will celebrate his 20th year working at Franklins by the end of August. He started as the chef and has grown to mastermind the restaurant menu, beer tastings and the launch of the ice cream shop. Heckrotte, whose first job was at Friendly’s ice cream shop at the Mall in Columbia, and Franklin said they’ve mulled the idea for years but things really picked up after the pandemic.

They began doing their research — that is, eating a lot of ice cream, they said — and debated things such as whether to make gelato or frozen custard before landing on the classic formulation. They consulted experts and suppliers, some of whom told them to make their lives easier and use ice cream base mixes.

But they committed to to the same ethos they apply to their restaurant and brewery by making ice cream from scratch using ingredients from dairy farms in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. They take maybe even more pride in their quest to serve Franklins’ vegan clientele. The two developed a soy base used in the shop’s many vegan flavors and that delights vegans and nonvegans alike, they said.

“The thing with any of the nondairy ice cream is basically you’re trying to make water taste good,” Heckrotte said with a grin. “We started making it up and having regular customers come down, and we’d give them stuff and be like, ‘So, you wanna know the dirty little secret? There is no dairy in there.’”

The pair got excited about what they were making but weren’t sure they could fit the operation in their building. Hyattsville passersby might have noticed a cotton-candy-pink storefront a few doors down at 5115 Baltimore Ave. that has “Franklins Ice Cream” and a triple-scoop cone painted on it. Franklin and Heckrotte said the original plan was to run the parlor there. But a July 2023 fire, which also affected Franklins, scrapped that plan because of high renovation costs.

Now a similar color scheme and illustration are painted on Franklins’ second entrance from the Rhode Island Avenue Trolley Trail. Visitors who enter through that door are greeted by an image of a rubber chicken in an ice cream cone (a nod to Franklin’s previous career as a toy salesperson) and step right into the scoop shop.

Standouts from my recent visit included coffee toffee and the nondairy chocolate banana. But, for the purposes of reevaluating my rankings, how was the vanilla? (One cherished colleague questioned the validity of my rankings because of the monastic joylessness of eating only vanilla, or as put by Banner reader and commenter Pete D.: “Judging La Neveria Michoacana based on its vanilla ice cream is like judging a taqueria on its chicken fingers.” Nevertheless.)

Franklins uses a mix of Nielsen-Massey and Madagascar vanilla beans and paste, Heckrotte said, which gave its rendition the most visible flecks in my survey. It showed in the notable punch of flavor, and the ice cream had a pleasant creaminess.

As in life and journalism, one of the most noble things you owe yourself and others is owning up to your mistakes. Franklins did indeed deserve a spot on my list and would comfortably sit no lower than No. 3. It’s a very close call between Franklins and Ice Cream Jubilee as Prince George’s finest hard-serve option. Clearly, the only thing to do is return to both and keep tasting.

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