Recently, while on one of our field trips with my parents, we stopped for supper at Ye Olde Mill in Utica, Ohio. Utica is a small town with about 2,000 residents and is home to the Velvet Ice Cream Factory. In fact, Ye Olde Mill is located on the grounds of the Velvet Ice Cream Factory which seems more like a park than a factory. The Velvet Ice Cream Company invites you to spend a day surrounded by ice cream! Wow! Sounds pretty close to heaven!
We didn’t spend the day there, and we were too late for the factory tour, but we did get to enjoy some wonderful food and delicious ice cream. Ye Olde Mill was restored by the Dager family, owners of Velvet Ice Cream, in 1970. The factory sits on 20 acres with a picnic pavilion and a small Museum of Milling. There is a nice gift shop.
The restaurant is called “The Wheel Room” and is decorated colonial style. The waitresses wear long dresses and aprons. The food is simple but still very good and reasonably priced. I had a BLT, Dad had a fried bologna sandwich, Mom had chicken salad, and Tom had a chicken wrap. All the sandwiches were served with Utz potato chips. None of us ate our potato chips because we were saving room for ice cream which, of course, is the main reason people come here.
The ice cream menu is more extensive than the dinner menu. There were 35 flavors of regular ice cream (some seasonal flavors: elephant ear and peach cobbler), three flavors of no-sugar added, three flavors of churned frozen yogurt, and three flavors of sherbet. Tom ordered a small sundae and I got the apple dumpling with old fashioned vanilla ice cream. The apple dumpling was small with a light, doughy crust and was very good. I even felt good about ordering it because it was less than I expected.
Mom and Dad, who have been here before, ordered the decadent desserts. Dad got the famous Messy Mess Sundae. It was a bowl filled with hot fudge until the hot fudge ran down the sides then rolled in nuts. The bowl was then filled with vanilla ice cream and topped with more hot fudge, whipped cream and a cherry. Dad ate it all, including scraping the nuts and hot fudge off the side of the dish.
Mom got the Buckeye Brownie Sundae. It was a big brownie with Buckeye Brownie Ice Cream topped with peanut butter and hot fudge and whipped cream. It even had a buckeye candy on top of it. She didn’t eat all of it, but she polished off more than I was expecting her to eat! Mom always says “there’s always room for ice cream!”
None of us tried the most decadent dessert on the menu, the Licking Legend (Utica is in Licking County). Five scoops of any flavor, bananas, cherries, hot fudge, marshmallow, whipped cream and nuts. Yikes! All your calories for the week in one dessert!
After our meal, we strolled around the grounds, working off some of that ice cream (ha!) We enjoyed our time at Ye Olde Mill very much. If you are close to Utica and like ice cream, you will want to put this on your “try it” list.