David at Tangentialism does some great ice cream investigative blogging with a look at the Original Chinatown Ice Cream Factory and the suspiciously same-dragon-festoned Nolita Ice Cream Factory. David found a letter at the OCICF saying customers "should not be deceived by imitation brands" and that other companies having been using their trademarked images without permission, while some say it is related. Gothamist wonders if the Nolita location (allegedly owned by one of the brothers who run OCICF) tried to get around the trademark situation by only have four Chinese characters, versus Chinatown's five, but from our extremely limited Chinese character reading abilities, we think the missing character is "hang" (rising tone), which refers to a physical space. If anything, Gothamist feels that besides the Nolita Ice Cream Factory's hopes to appeal to gwei lo and ABCs, it's probably trying to siphon the Eileen's Cheesecake business as well as from Ciao Bello's and Rice to Riches' (does anyone still go there) masses. Which now makes us want to get some red bean ice cream.
There was a dumpling war earlier this summer, and Gothamist predicts the next Chinese food staple/standby to have a showdown are the streetcarts that sell those sweet, egg-shaped (sort of like waffles) breads.
Photograph by David Yee
