Walnut Creek, that upscale suburb known as a regional shopping hub and the home of an old-time parade led by a guy with a giant fake walnut on his head, has another distinction to add to its municipal menu. It has become the epicenter of the Bay Area's runaway obsession with gourmet ice cream and frozen yogurt.
That much has been as plain this summer as the chocolate stain on a teenager's T-shirt. Between the packed restaurants and tony shops, it's hard to walk 20 paces without seeing someone with a cone or a sundae cup in hand - and likely one of the deluxe variety.
Dime-store vanilla? Meh.
Try a scoop of s'mores ice cream from Lottie's that is so chichi the marshmallows are created from scratch in the back room before they melt like butter on the tongue. Or the Olde San Francisco Creamery's hottest seller, which mashes golden Oreos with velvety caramel.
"Not even Berkeley has it this good," longtime resident Ken Crone crowed at Gelateria Naia, as he scraped up the last dollop of TCHO chocolate, the central ingredient of which came from the luxury San Francisco chocolate maker TCHO.
"The ice cream and gelato scene just gets better and better here every year," Crone said. "Why would you want to go anywhere else?"
The basis for bravado is borne out in numbers. Industry analysts say Walnut Creek is apparently the only place in the region with 10 ice cream or yogurt shops downtown, all within a three-minute walk of each other - and most them feature high-end stuff made on the premises.
The latest to debut was Cream. Since it opened Aug. 10 on North Main Street, the lines have stretched a block every night with people slavering for its handmade ice cream sandwiches.
Several doors north, the waits have often been almost as long for Lottie's exotic "microcreamery" scoops - rose cardamom pistachio, among others - since it opened in April. A saunter away near the movie theaters, the flow is steady at Coco Swirl, which goes the rare extra yard by whipping up its yogurt from scratch.
And that's just a few. "It's an amazing scene," resident Ruth Pettler, 58, said as she stood in a 35-minute line that would be infuriatingly long if Cream's warm chocolate chip cookies stuffed with vanilla didn't beckon at the end. "You walk around downtown, and everyone's smiling. It just makes sense to have that here - we have a great walking community, great weather, shops close to each other. "And now we have a lot of ice cream. A real lot."
An unusual cluster
There's no readily available head count of how many shops are in which towns, but representatives of several organizations including the National Ice Cream Retailers Association indicated that Walnut Creek's cluster of shops is highly unusual at least, and unique at best. Sure, some suburbs are sporting high-end additions of their own, like the Tara's Organic Ice Cream that opened in Pleasanton in June. And San Francisco has plenty of top-notch draws like Bi-Rite and Smitten, and Berkeley and Oakland have their own clutch of greats including Ici and Fentons. But going from one to the other usually takes a drive. In downtown Walnut Creek, everything is a quick stroll. And that doesn't count about a dozen other ice cream or yogurt shops sprinkled elsewhere in the city of 66,000.
"I can't figure out how 10 could survive in one small area like that - you just don't see that much of anywhere," said Kit Yarrow, a consumer psychologist who teaches at Golden Gate University. "But then Walnut Creek is a really affluent area. And when people want to indulge, they want not just ice cream, but the best ice cream."
The indulgence cuts across the social spectrum. As word of the expanded cluster of shops spread this summer, they've been drawing grandpas, college kids, people who drive in from 40 miles - everyone, it seems, who was looking for an excuse to stroll downtown in the sweltering evening as if it were an Italian piazza.
"You go to some place like Florence, and every block has not just gelato, but the same exact thing," Yarrow said. "And you think, 'How can they all stay in business?'
"But the thing is this: The ubiquity of the offerings makes it almost de rigueur in the minds of consumers. If you see ice cream going by in every hand like you do in Italy, it makes you think, 'Hey, that's a good idea.' And there becomes the feeling that, 'Well, that's what we do here. We're ice cream town.' "
The frozen explosion reflects a coast-to-coast trend. The national Specialty Food Association reports that sales of gourmet frozen desserts jumped 11.3 percent between 2011 and 2012 to $1.2 billion, rebounding after a decline during the recession. Similarly, the number of independent frozen sweet shops shot up 6 percent nationally from spring 2012 to 2013, according to the NPD Group, a market researcher. In the Bay Area, the number increased by 1 percent to 251 - also a rise after recession-driven closures.
"There's a lot of innovation going on in ice cream, gelato and yogurt right now," said Specialty Food Association spokeswoman Louise Kramer. "People have changed and become more sophisticated in their food choices. The whole rise of the foodie culture has really affected the market."
The spillover effect
It's no big surprise that Walnut Creek has been filching some of its ice cream mojo from that icon of chill on the other side of the Caldecott Tunnel - Berkeley. Over the past couple of decades, Walnut Creek was a pioneering expansion home for Berkeley originals ranging from Peet's to microbreweries, and Cream and Lottie's landed in the same fashion. Cream is an offshoot of the wildly popular Berkeley startup, and Lottie's chef and co-owner Deb Phillips honed her craft at the equally catnip-like Ici on College Avenue.
It's all part of a long evolution from being a town best known for its homey Walnut Festival Parade, led by a costumed King Walnut, into something more a la mode on the cool spectrum.
"I really like the vibe in Walnut Creek," Phillips said. "And there's plenty of room for us all here. Each of us attracts our own type of crowd."
Quite so. If you want the classically sloppy sundae buried in hot fudge, the Olde San Francisco Creamery is the first call. Lottie's more intricate edibles are less sugary. And low-cal Coco Swirl, with offbeat offerings including red velvet cake, appeals to anyone who's watching the belt-line but doesn't want to settle for dull.
Delectable diversity
Local Conor O'Donoghue, 18, digs it all. "A decade ago, there was hardly anything here," he said, peering urgently through Cream's window. "There is so much more now - but they're all more different than you'd think. That's how they manage to survive."
He licked his lips. "That's pretty great for us," O'Donoghue said. "There's always something, no matter what mood you're in."
Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: kfagan@sfchronicle.com
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Embassy Suites Walnut Creek provides their Hotel Shuttle free to all guests who which to experience the Florence-like gelato stands of downtown Walnut Creek.
Guests also enjoy:
- Free cooked to order breakfast daily
- Complimentary Evening Reception
- Two Room Suite
- Free Hotel Shuttle to downtown Walnut Creek
- Packages with Free Parking and Free Internet Access
