Who Has The Better Ice, Rita’s or The Meadows
Maddie Martin, Caden Lloyd, and Curtis Shinn
Staff Writers
As summer comes to a close and fall creeps in, we need to discuss one of the most prominent features from our summers: ice cream. More specifically, Italian ice.
The recent Italian ice addition to the Carlisle Pike (Rita’s Italian Ice) opened in the spring of 2020 coming at the Cumberland Valley community with a variety of flavors that frequently change.
The shop is located in the Hampton Center shopping plaza which also includes places like Karn's, Planet Fitness, and Palumbos Pizza.
But how does the latest Italian ice shop compare to the senior shop on the other side of town that has been around since 2012?
The Meadows opened in the spring of 2012 and is located much farther down the pike in Carlisle. Much like Ritas, they have flavors that change almost weekly. The Meadows is located in a plaza that also includes a Dollar General, China One, and Napoli's Pizza.
Both places also offer soft serve ice cream, and the Meadows offers hard ice cream which changes flavors weekly.
Rita's has a wider variety of italian ice flavors, but The Meadows does offer more ice cream based products than Ritas does. So, if we are only comparing italian ices, Rita's does have the better flavor selection. When we tried it out there were 12 flavors for us to choose from, and we chose to compare the blue raspberry and cherry from both shops.
The texture is one of the substantial differences between the italian ices. Rita's is much softer and a more smooth consistency, which caused it to melt fast. The italian ice from The Meadows has a harder texture that is more difficult to get your spoon through.
The tastes of the flavors themselves were pretty similar, but it was notable that the Meadows italian ice in both cherry and blue raspberry was sweeter than Rita's. Neither tasted bad, one just had a sweeter flavor than the other.
Concluding at possibly one of the most important aspects of comparison: pricing. We decided to get larges at both Rita's and The Meadows. The large at Ritas came in at $6.24 for 8 ounces and $4.71 at The Meadows for 8 ounces. Also notable that The Meadows has a special every Tuesday where you can get any size Italian ice or gelati for $1.00 off.
Both The Medows and Ritas are solid Italian Ice shops and are worth a try!