Ice Cream Jubilee - Ballston — Restaurant in Virginia

As one of your early fans from the Navy Yard days when you were still experimenting with flavors, this one star is not reflective of just one recent experience but a consistent decline in quality and service. The Ballston location serves freezer burnt scoops of ice cream (chunks of ice!) every week regardless of season. The scoop sizes continue to diminish while prices increase, $6.50 for a single flavor scoop, you gotta be kidding-yes, it's comparable to a Van Leeuwen but one, your flavor diversity is lacking (can count your old hits on the fingers of one hand and the far and few new launches are avoidable) and two, local/neighborhood artisan ice cream shops are delivering better quality in the same or lesser price range. And soft serve for the same price as a scoop, seriously!

Coming back to the flavors, the rum and raisin was a shame, it is a classic favor, but whoever gave you the idea of dunking a packet of raisins in rum and then throwing the entire thing into the ice cream clearly never tasted the classic flavor before. Then there was this summer's orange creamsicle, less like a creamsicle more like a cough syrup. Whatever happened to your honey lavender days.

Service, is anyone doing a sanity check at the Ballston location? Most of the times they are out of the serving dish/container for the flight. The staff is disengaged and at times bordering between clueless, rude, indifferent. The final thaw for our family was our six year old requesting for an empty cup (like kids often do) to cover her ice cream cone so the ice didn't drop. She was told "you will be charged for the cup, our management told us." Then the little girl noticed her cone was fully cracked within seconds of being handed the ice cream, "my cone broke". We were told, "you should have bought a waffle cone instead of a sugar cone, they are cheap and break all the time."

Whatever happened to kindness and customer service.

We are taking our weekly ice cream business to...

Pay attention to what they charge you! I feel that the employee tricked us into paying more.

So their ice cream costs something like: $5.45 for 1 scoop, $6.45 for 2 scoops, and $7.45 for 3 scoops. Anyway, my wife ordered 2 scoops of different flavors. The employee asked if she wanted them in 2 separate cups. We thought that was nice because that way, the flavors would not mix, so she said yes. After she already paid and after the ice cream have already been scooped, we realized that the employee charged her 2x of 1 scoop, which ended up being $12. This is almost double the price of her order of 2 scoops.

So my wife asked the employee: did we really end up paying $5 more because you used 2 different cups? And the employee said yes, then pointed out that that's why she asked if my wife wanted them in 2 separate cups. The employee explained that she never wants to assume that customers want 2 scoops in 1 cup. But I guess she very conveniently assumes that customers are willing to pay $5 more just to get an extra paper cup, so she doesn't bother disclosing the extra cost to the customers.

Anyway, she said she would be more than happy to refund the original amount we paid of $12 and charge us the revised amount of $7. I personally think people tend to act too friendly when they get caught doing something dishonest. "No problem, don't worry about it" -- as if she was doing us a favor, when in reality, she knew exactly what she was doing.

And then the weirdest thing happened. After we paid the new amount, the employee then proceeded to THROW AWAY the 2 cups of ice cream that she had already scooped! Why was that necessary?! What a waste! And then she re-created our order but this time, put the 2 flavors in 1 cup. We didn't understand what was happening -- was she trying to make a point?

So yeah, act all friendly, trick customers into paying more, and if you get caught, theatrically throw away your company's product...

I don’t know who posted the correlating photos but there are zero donuts, or chocolate chip cookies. But let’s dive into the point at hand ... the ice cream. Now, I don’t consider myself an ice cream connoisseur, but I do consider myself an ice cream fanatic. Every state I visit, I gotta try an ice cream spot, and this one was trash. The photos look nothing, I repeat, nothing like what you get. My boyfriend and mother went before me when ordering, so they were trapped into the purchase. I asked for a sample before purchasing and am so glad I did. I tried their cookie and cookie ice cream and it was like licking a freezer burnt vanilla ice cream pop sickle of some sort. It had no flavor. None. Zip. The customer service was sub par as well, the woman who asked if I liked the sample almost shamed me into feeling the way I felt. She told me how everyone loved it, then continued on to chatting with her friends. It was just an overall bad experience. Stay away. Hell, go to cold stone creamery if you want anything with flavor. At least your experience and taste buds will feel a sense or...