Sweetie’s Ice Cream: The 1948 Window Parramore Brought Back
Goff's served soft serve at 212 S. Orange Blossom Trail from 1948 until fire closed it in 2022. Sweetie's — No. 7 for ice cream in our rankings, Net Score 91.1 — reopened the window in November 2023, with mini pancakes and a youth-training mission.
3 minute read
Every Orlando generation has stood at the same window. At 212 South Orange Blossom Trail, on the edge of Parramore in the Lorna Doone neighborhood, a small walk-up ice cream stand has been serving soft serve since 1948 — first as Goff’s Drive In, and since November 2023 as Sweetie’s Ice Cream. Sweetie’s ranks No. 7 for ice cream in Orlando in our rankings, with a Net Score of 91.1 — see our best ice cream rankings, whose category winner is profiled in the Sampaguita winner feature. But the ranking is the least interesting thing about this window. The interesting thing is that the window is open at all.
Goff’s: the window that outlasted everything
Edwin Goff opened the stand in 1948. When he retired, the Truesdell family kept it going — Bill Truesdell had worked for Goff as a teenager before buying the shop in 1973 — and Goff’s became one of Orlando’s oldest continuously loved businesses: a cinder-block walk-up on the Trail, near Church Street, that withstood hurricanes, the protests and tensions of the 1960s, a 1951 explosion that ripped through the side of the stand, and a pandemic. Local reporting through the decades treats it less like a shop and more like a piece of civic furniture — the place generations of Orlando families marked summers by.
Then, in May 2022, fire tore through the beloved shop and damaged the building beyond repair. More than seventy years of memory stood in a burned shell on Orange Blossom Trail, and the reasonable assumption was that the story was over.
Sweetie’s: Parramore reopens its own window
It was not over, because two partners from this side of the city decided it was not. Eric McIntosh and Jelani Gray — Gray’s childhood nickname, Sweetie, gave the new shop its name — rebuilt the stand, and Sweetie’s Ice Cream opened on November 4, 2023. McIntosh’s route here runs through the city’s own Youth Employment Program, where he was once a student learning the fundamentals of earning a paycheck and saving money; the partners have since partnered with the city to give young residents the same on-the-job experience. That is not a marketing line. That is the neighborhood’s oldest ice cream window being reopened by people from the neighborhood, for the neighborhood, with a training pipeline attached.
What to get at the window
The stand’s survival story has a second chapter worth knowing. Reporting on the Goff’s years records how the little window became a genuine crossroads in a divided city — a place whose custom crossed lines that the era drew everywhere else, which is part of why its loss to fire in 2022 landed as civic news rather than a business brief. Sweetie’s inheritance, in other words, is not just a building and a soft-serve machine. It is a role: the Trail’s front porch, where Parramore, downtown and the stadium crowds all end up in the same line, ordering the same swirl. The new owners understood that from the first day, which is why the reopening played less like a launch and more like a homecoming.
The format is the classic one: soft serve at a walk-up window, priced for actual people. The signature move of the new era is the mini pancakes — served with a swirl of soft-serve ice cream and your choice of toppings — alongside banana split sundaes, Oreo sundaes, milkshakes and build-your-own cups. The shop posts its hours as open daily, early afternoon into the evening; check its social channels before a special trip, as small windows keep human schedules. Pair it with barbecue at Jesse’s Rib Shack a few blocks west for the full Parramore two-course, find both on our Orlando Top Spots Map, and read the whole table in our Parramore eating guide. A No. 7 ranking is a fine thing. A 1948 window, saved, is a better one.
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