Cloudy with a chance of ice cream sandwiches

For Melissa's birthday, we went down to the Lower East Side to The Meatball Shop - the place everyone's been raving about but we've never been able to get into due to the 2+ hour wait times.
Luckily, 5 of Melissa's closest friends were able to join her on Stanton Street to mark up our menus and create all kinds of meatball concoctions.

Now, the fun part of The Meatball Shop is the ability to customize your meal.  You can order a beef meatball slider with tomato sauce, alongside a pork meatball with parmesan cream.  Or a bowl of meatballs covered in sauce.  Or a meatball hero. Then there's the side dishes.  Salads, and vegetables, and pasta, served over or under your meatballs.  There are so many decisions to make with your meal, you could spend hundreds of visits trying each combination once.  The menus are printed on a dry erase sheet, and you X off your selection with black marker.  By the time I ordered, I had changed my mind so many times that my index finger had turned black.

One would assume that because dinner was so hard to order, dessert would be easy.  Not the case.  Dessert was JUST as tricky.  The Meatball Shop lets you customize your ice cream sandwich by selecting two cookies, either the same or different flavors, with a choice of chocolate chip, peanut butter, brownie, ginger snap and coconut macaroon.  Then you pick the ice cream, vanilla, chocolate, mint, and the special flavor of the day black raspberry.

Our group mixed it all up, and our selections ranged across the entire dessert menu.  I ordered a brownie cookie, chocolate chip cookie, and vanilla ice cream in the middle.  I know, I know - what chocoholic orders vanilla?  But I was so full from the meatballs that there was no room left for dessert.  I figured if I ordered something I didn't like, I wouldn't eat it all.  (PS - special thanks to guest stars of the night, Melissa, Ariel, Tristan, Annabel and Ryan for letting me gather the sandwiches for a picture before digging in!)

The brownie cookie was great, although I couldn't figure out at first which was which because the chocolate chip cookie was a dark shade of brown.  The brownie cookie was soft and had large chocolate chips that were melting slightly from the warmth of the cookie, into the ice cream.  The scoop of ice cream was large and couldn't be eaten as a sandwich, so most of us ate the cookies, dipping them into the ice cream as it melted into our bowls.  The chocolate chip cookie was harder than the brownie, and I didn't enjoy it as much.  The vanilla ice cream was a nice dip for the cookies, moistening them just the right among to make them soft and delicious!  Chocolate was the preferred flavor throughout the group, however Ryan raved about the black raspberry, and asked if it was possible to purchase a pint to go (it wasn't.)  The ice cream sandwiches are $4 each, which was consistent with the reasonable prices for the meatballs ($3 per slider, $7 for the bowl of meatballs, and $4 for side dishes).

The Meatball Shop is open Sunday - Wednesday from 12 - 2am, and Thursday - Saturday from 12 - 4am.   It's located at 84 Stanton Street, across from Arlene's Grocery.
http://www.themeatballshop.com/