Joe's IceCream

Joe's is Swansea's ice cream, and has been since 1922, when Joe Cascarini — son of an Italian émigré who had washed up in Swansea on a coal steamer — turned the family café on St Helen's Road into an ice cream parlour and worked out the vanilla blend the city has eaten ever since. It is still that recipe, still that family: it is run now by the Hughes brothers, Dominic and Adrian, descendants of the Cascarinis, from the original St Helen's Road parlour and a handful of others, the Mumbles seafront among them. The ice cream is deliberately old-fashioned — a plain, cold, brilliant vanilla that has outlived every trend, served in a tub or a cone or drowned in a knickerbocker glory. Swansea has a genuine attachment to the stuff; ask anyone who grew up there. A hundred years of one Italian-Welsh family making one thing better than anyone else in the city — and, most would say, the best ice cream in Wales.