Bruster's Real Ice Cream — Restaurant in Maryville

I would give 5 stars for delicious vegan ice cream options but I had to take away 3 stars sadly for their absolutely awful customer service. As much as I like to shop small and support and promote local businesses, this is one place I won’t be coming back to and have to caution you about. Read my review for allergen/dietary restriction options and how the workers treated us.

GLUTEN AND DAIRY: good selection of dairy free and vegan ice cream options. No dairy free chocolate mix-in options. They have nice sweet strawberry sauce as a good dairy free topping. Nuts too for those who like nuts. NO gluten free ice cream cones.

KETO/SUGAR FREE: their sugar free options use sucralose.

TERRIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE: we arrived Sunday evening. It was busy, I understand. We have gluten and dairy allergies and so asked, patiently and politely, about their cones, and my husband who avoids sucralose asked for the ingredients for their sugar free cappuccino. The cashier did not seem to like being asked those kinds of questions.

Patiently and politely, we asked for samples of different flavors. The worker was short with her answers and sharp with her tone. No smiles. As she was writing down our order, us asking for samples seemed incredibly burdensome for her and she did them in a huff after having to be reminded several times, because she kept putting it off, and she seemed visibly upset about having to give us samples.

As we gave her our order, my mother in law noticed she wrote it down incorrectly, so I had to figure out what order didn’t belong. As we were figuring that out, she angrily ripped out her paper, and angrily said, “I’m just going to start over!” She was visibly frustrated. I did not say anything rude in response to her shocking outburst, and tried to help her figure it out. We figured the order out, but when our order started coming out they STILL gave us incorrect items which I had to fix myself.

My husband noted to me that when the girl worker handed the order slip to a male coworker, VERY loudly, he said to her, “did you just take this order? This is the WORST timing!!” What a horribly rude thing to say in front of polite and paying customers!!!

My mother in law mentioned to me that the female cashier was also on the verge of tears at one point and had said it was a very busy day. If it is a busy and hard day, she should take a break or something instead of taking it out on customers. In my opinion busyness is never a good excuse for treating customers horribly the way these workers did.

Sadly, even though the ice cream was very tasty, their horrible attitude towards us ruined my experience. I’m just thankful my kids didn’t notice. So until the owner improves their customer service and busy hours protocol or something, we will not be back. Rather than being treated respectfully and politely, we were regarded as annoyances by angry teenagers who didn’t seem to appreciate our patronage in the least.

BEWARE if you’re going and it’s busy because you might be treated as...

Great ice cream, sundaes, banana splits, and any/every flavor you could possibly imagine! On Thursdays, (I believe it's Thurs., but I'd call ahead to make 100% sure), they do BYOB which mean "Bring your own banana" and you get 50% off banana splits. Thought that was cool. It gets extremely packed, like a madhouse in the summer!! But tends to slow down by mid fall. There's a "walk-thru" window so you don't have to go inside, you place your order at the window and can enjoy outdoor seating! Parking is very limited. As popular as this place is, they should try to expand their lot, but they do have limited space to work with being right off of W. Broadway coming off of 411 hwy. However, Sandy Springs Park is just around the corner & down the street a bit. So we usually stop in after letting the kiddos run wild at the park! Last thing, prices are a bit on the steep end when you think of ice cream... They have cups & cones and different sizes though. I usually get a small cup and it's $3.39- something like that- and the cups are so tiny looking, but I was actually surprised at how much ice cream they fit into those things!! More than I could eat anyway, so I suppose price is relative. Oh, & they also sell it by the half gallon as well as larger orders! Great little place, friendly high school kids working there, the kids will love it- just keep an eye on the smaller ones near the front as there can be lots of traffic...thankfully Bruster's has built a little wall and have some potted plants around to kinda seperate the two. Definitely worth a try! (If only just to check out all of the available flavors...

Let me start out by saying we love the taste of Bruster's ice cream. It is very creamy, and they often have actually good dairy-free flavors. We recently bought an ice cream cake for my daughter's birthday and the young lady who helped us was wonderful. However, a good majority of the employees here have not been trained properly on customer service. We went last night for my mother-in-law's birthday, and her ice cream sunday was much smaller than usual. She was really looking forward to it, so that was sad. It also took over 10 minutes to get our ice creams, we were the only customers, and there were 4 employees. They spent the majority of the time standing around chatting, one was eating ice cream, when they could have been helping to get our order together and then cleaning. The whole place is relatively dirty. It's not awful, but it could certainly use a more thorough cleaning. We've had other situations in the past, such as a rancid-tasting milkshake that the young man refused to remake. He said the lime icecream in a milkshake just creates that flavor, which he should have told my daughter when she first ordered it, and she would have ordered something else. I didn't let her drink it in case it really was rancid :( I've written directly to Bruster's several times and have not heard back, which is a disappointment. I worked at Starbucks for 13 years, and was a manager for a majority of that time, so I know what it takes to run a good store. A LOT of work but so rewarding when you put in the effort! Not what I'm seeing here but so hoping...