We All Scream For Helados

Take a walk around most Buenos Aires neighborhoods, and you’ll notice the heladerías, or ice cream shops, packed with hungry sweet-toothed Porteños. Here, eating ice cream is a favorite activity, no matter what time of year.

Helado in Argentina can be compared to the Italian variety. The ice cream tends to be similar to gelato. It is dense and silky, like a pliable soft serve.

Flavors usually fall under the categories of chocolates, creams, dulce de leches, and water-based fruit flavors, similar to sorbet. The sweet wine custard zabaione, known locally as sambayón, is also quite popular. 

Dulce de leche is the king of all flavors, and many shops even make multiple types like dulce de leche with nuts, brownies, chocolate chunks, blackberries, bananas, and even double dulce de leche. 

When clients enter the ice cream shop, usually they will first select the size: by the cone, cup, ¼ kilo, ½ kilo, and kilo. Then, they pay for their ice cream based on the size. After, it’s time to select their flavors of choice. Typically, a cup or cone will allow two flavors, while ½ kilo or kilo allows three or four. 

Many ice cream shops offer delivery services. Call (or order from a food app) from your favorite heladería, select the size and flavors, and in no time the ice cream will be delivered directly to your door. If no delivery is available, it's common to pick up and bring home, especially in larger sizes by the kilo.

Ask any helado expert, and they will probably tell you that Gruta serves the best ice cream in the city. The family-owned Belgrano ice cream shop has been making artisanal helado for 43 years. 

In 1947, Héctor Ambieni started working in an Italian ice cream shop in the Flores neighborhood. In 1977, he was finally able to open Grutas, his own shop in Belgrano. Together with his sons Oscar, Marcelo, and Silvano, then his nephew Alejandro, and today his grandchildren, this helado family has continued making high-quality ice cream for three generations of Argentines.

Gruta makes more than 50 flavors, but their most popular are the dulce de leche, sambayón, and chocolate trifecta. They are also known for their homemade caramelized almonds, which they add on top to any order of a half kilo or more. 

Helado runs through the veins of the Harpe family. Martín’s grandfather began the ice cream-making tradition, and then his father opened a shop in the Cordoba province, and today he continues the third-generation legacy at Pistacchio in Chacarita. But unlike most ice cream shops in Argentina, Pistacchio is far from conventional.

The homemade flavors at Pistacchio aren't like any other ice cream shop in the country. They are constantly changing and rotating, depending upon seasonal fruits and the innovation of the maestro ice cream maker. 

Many ice cream shops offer a bañado en chocolate, or a chocolate dip. Often, this extra is free or at a minimal charge.

Via Flaminia in Acassuso, a northern suburb, opened its doors in 1965. They are known for their chocolate dipped cucurucho (cone), which reaches 60 cm. (24") long. They have mastered a special technique to stretch out the ice cream while upside down in the cone and dip it in chocolate so it forms a hard shell, appearing to be an ice cream sword.