Despite its name, leafy Edgebrook has always seemed the city’s least edgy neighborhood. Until you encounter Chocolate Shoppe Ice Cream, a corner storefront on Devon that combines sweet desserts with vitriolic satire. From the grotesque—and at Halloween, ghoulish—effigies of Trump, Clinton, Putin and others in front, to graffiti-like murals inside, the Chocolate Shoppe turns the simple purchase of a cone of fudge ripple (cash only) into a transgressive gesture. It was in the revolutionary year of 1968 that proprietor Ron Mondel took over what was then a Baskin-Robbins franchise. The nearly half-century since “has been a blink,” says Mondel, a free spirit who describes modern life as a “global social engineering program.” His shop is an oasis of consciousness, where zombies on the wall and in the window help in their own small way to de-zombify the times.
