Queens Cafe

*THE* best ice cream in Glasgow without a doubt. This place truly is a hidden gem. For anyone not local to Victoria Road or the South East of Glasgow the Queen’s Café may just look like your bog standard café with a dated shop front and seem like nothing special. On the contrary, the Queen’s Café’s vanilla ice cream is made with an age old Italian family recipe that is to die for. It has stayed the same since I was a child and since my mother was a child so it must be at least 50 years old and is truly timeless. I have heard that years in the past it has won critically acclaimed prizes for the ice cream and with the recipe still the same as it was then I am not surprised. I stay in the East End now but will travel out of my way to treat myself to this delicious dessert. Beautiful on its own but if you feel like really treating yourself a vanilla double nougat is the way to go! With raspberry sauce of course! A family business staffed by the family and people from the local area who are always friendly. The prices are extremely reasonable and for the quality of ice cream you receive it is so worth it! However, I do believe all of the other flavours are bought in. They are still delicious but just not at the same calibre as the classic vanilla. I only go in here for the ice cream so can’t really comment on the rest of the menu although I think it is standard café food.

Oh my Lord, I am such a sucker for art deco inspired décor! So whenever I walk past this café I swoon, because the linear stained glass and simple, old fashioned appeal of this place is rather pleasing on the eyes!
But as nice as old, battered leather booths and old fashioned ice cream café’s look, Queens Café is just as pleasing on a stomach. Be prepared to eat the breakfast of kings here, with double portion bacon and egg rolls, full Scottish breakfasts and chips for lunch… yummy scrummy in my tummy!
Sadly I am not on Victoria Road enough to get a chance to eat in Queens Café often. However, I have loved it since it saved my bacon the fateful morning I had my first ever hangover! I had three rolls that day, what a glutton! But I recovered as soon as the egg yolk oozed down my throat while my friend and I dissected going’s on from a party we attended the night before.
Those were the days. Now hangovers are not so exciting, partying is not gossipworthy or anything to write home about, and the recession combined with the reality of being an adult has hit home. But along with the décor, the prices have largely stayed the same since 2003, and the bacon rolls are just as good. Well worth a visit, and a great place to take your nan for a brew!

One of, if not *the* finest ice cream in Glasgow!
There’s no doubt about this. The Queens Café is a nice wee café too, with little red booths and an art deco set up that automatically makes you think of the 50s when Glasgow was littered with little places like this. The café is all but the same as it was when my dad was a young man, and the food, drinks and ice cream are all much the same as well.
A few years ago the Independent did a list of the top 50 ice cream parlours in Glasgow and there was the Queens Café, pride of place in the list. Grab yourself an ice cream and take a nice wander in the Queens Park. A summers day gets little better than that.

It’s good that places like this are still going, and from the big plastic ice-​cream outside to the quarters of rhubarb and custard on sale, the 50s throwback feel is fairly unmistakable here.
I’ve had a couple of ice creams from here which have been as nice as you’d expect from such a place, but was always intrigued by the prospect of trying an ice cream float, the concept of fizzy cola and ice cream sounding revolting, but fascinating.
So one day I sat in here, alone, and went for it. Unsurprisingly it was horrible, but worth trying to get a glimpse of how peculiar youngsters’ taste buds were a few decades ago.

While it is true that the decoration and cleaning are rather… old fashioned, if you arrive at the café in the early evening, you can catch the early evening news on an old fashioned, pre-​plasma screen television. This adds to the dated feel, which is one of its main charms. That, and the hot muffin, ice cream combination, which extends the ice cream season into the winter.
There is something nostalgic about this café, which is why I always order Bovril to drink and vanilla ice cream, despite the range of other drinks and flavours. The menu isn’t extensive, and this is more like a sweet shop with café attached at times: it never gets busy, and isn’t that great to sit in with more than three other people.

This is a good old-​style café with a giant ramshackle ice cream in the window and red plastic chairs like the ones you got in school inside. They do some snacks, but I just bought an ice cream and went for a walk. Their ice cream is very good, even though I’m not the biggest ice cream fan. It looks like it hasn’t been decorated or, possibly, cleaned since the 50s, but the dirt just adds to the ice cream flavour. It’s also good for your immune system to help build up a bit of a resistance. Yum!

Traditional. Old school style and holds a lot of its original personality.

Definitely is the best ice cream in Glasgow. My sons call it the ‘special ice cream shop’ because it’s so good. People travel miles for a big tub!