Location: 44 Queen Street, Niagara on the Lake
Website: https://cows.ca/

Cows has been a Niagara on the Lake institution since 1983, so they’re obviously doing something right.  Though in this case, I think the thing they did right was picking a location that’s right in the middle of the main road in a very touristy town.  Because the actual ice cream isn’t that great.

It’s relatively rich and creamy, so it’s certainly very, very far from the worst ice cream I’ve ever had.  But the flavour was a pretty big shrug.

I got the Wowie Cowie, which is “vanilla ice cream, English toffee marble, chocolate flakes & moo crunch.”

The vanilla ice cream doesn’t taste like anything but generic sweetness.  There’s nothing there.  Plain ice cream can be amazing — the sweet cream at Ed’s, which doesn’t even have vanilla bean to fall back on, manages to pack in an impressive amount of flavour and depth.  Meanwhile, this tasted like sweet nothing.

The “English toffee marble” was even worse, and there’s a lot of it rippled in there.  It didn’t have any of the rich caramel flavour you’d expect from English toffee; it was just thick and sweet, like plain corn syrup.

As for the other elements, the chocolate was fine, and the moo crunch didn’t even seem to be there (I’m not sure what it was supposed to be, but I didn’t notice anything but the caramel and the chocolate).