Antoinette's Sweets
5981 Transit Rd, Depew, NY 14043
Phone: 716.684.2376
See More Restaurant Reviews For:
Candies Chocolate Depew Ice Cream West Seneca

"The appeal of Antoinette's is fairly obvious: it's an ice cream shop - specifically, a sundae specialist - first, and a candy shop second, with just enough semi-novel items to merit a sample or two."

We don't like to leave things half finished, and when we visited Depew's Antoinette's Sweets last week, we knew we hadn't finished our work there. Sure, the place is half candy store and half ice cream shop, and we'd sampled most of its chocolate specialties, and tried one of the milkshakes, besides. But we knew - and mentioned in our brief article - that Antoinette's was perhaps best known for its ice cream sundaes, popular both at the Depew location and its predecessor in West Seneca, Antoinette's On The Hill. Surely, the sundaes would merit a near-term revisit, and days later, we dropped in again to see what the big deal was about, expanding the original article to discuss the rest of the story.

The Candy Shop. On our first visit, what caught our attention was was the candy shop side of Antoinette's. By comparison with the retro, fancy Alethea's in Williamsville near Clarence, and the sophisticated Buffalo chocolatier Chow Chocolat, the Antoinette's candy shop is relatively unpretentious but nice; in late January, we found it decked out for Valentine's Day with heart-shaped bon bon boxes, plenty of candy jars, and a variety of low-key, homemade specialties. These specialties include three items that may or may not be familiar to Western New Yorkers: Greek Mints, Rum Wafers, and one that virtually everyone from Buffalo knows, Sponge Candy. We felt obliged to try them all. A bunch. And purely for research purposes, of course.

The best items in the bunch were the pieces of Sponge Candy, honeycomb-filled chocolates that Antoinette's offers in milk, dark, and orange chocolate versions. They weren't particularly distinctive, but they were nice: Antoinette's take on Sponge Candy is a little thicker with chocolate on top than the norm, which has the effect of actually diminishing the impact of the honeycomb center, but also keeping moisture from intruding and softening the sweet, deliberately crunchy core. By comparison, there was very little going on in the Rum Wafers, which a server suggested would have a chewy, alcohol-flavored core, but what we found instead was amazingly close to plain - but overpriced - milk chocolate in wafer-shaped form. Sold in 7-ounce boxes for $7.50, the wafers were so bland that we consulted the list of ingredients on the box, finding only the slightest reference to any alcohol content. They could have been served without any reference to rum and no one would have known the difference.

That left the Greek Mints, which the server accurately described as being essentially homemade versions of Andes mint chocolates, their top halves green and their bottoms brown, or vice-versa depending on how you're holding them. Somewhat surprisingly, neither the mint nor the chocolate was exceptionally strong in flavor: the mint was gentle, and the chocolate solid rather than soft and yielding like the easily melted Andes take. The versions we saw at the candy counter were roughly twice the size of the small Andes chocolates and square-ish, but Antoinette's also includes the Mints in one of its many sundaes, where the pieces were noticeably larger and - thanks to the ice cream - harder and a little more challenging to chew through. More on that in a moment.

Our overall impression of the chocolates at Antoinette's was positive, but not overwhelmingly so: they were good, and each at least a little different from what we've tried elsewhere, but they were neither cheap nor especially amazing in any way. If we were to call ourselves fans of anything here, it would be the ice cream.

The Ice Cream Shop. To make one point up front: while we're not going to say that all ice cream is the same - to the contrary, it's certainly not - the appeal of any ice cream shop depends in equal parts upon a variety of different factors, only one of which is the ice cream itself. The composition of sundaes, more specifically the extent to which they entice you with interesting descriptions and then match or exceed your expectations with generous use of naughty ingredients, is a critical factor; presentation and pricing obviously count for something, as well. There's nothing quite as disappointing as shelling out $5 or $6 for a tiny little dish of ice cream with only modest traces of syrup and a whole lot of whipped cream on top to disguise the absence of anything special.

Antoinette's does not have that problem in any way, shape, or form. The core of its $5-6 sundaes is ice cream - frankly unspectacular ice cream, in our view - but like all great ice cream parlors, it knows precisely how to dole out the sauces in doses that will satisfy even the most gluttonous customers. A Mint Chocolate Parfait, for instance, was loaded up with so much chocolate syrup, green mint sauce, and huge chunks of Greek Mints that we immediately realized we'd made a mistake ordering two separate sundaes: this one could easily have fed two people, and we wound up bringing half of it home. Our comments about the Greek Mints still stand - they were milder and a little tougher to chew than they might have been - but the half-chocolate, half-vanilla ice cream, sauces, and whipped cream went well together, and would have stuffed a pig.

Our second sundae, the Turtle, was another exercise in overabundance. Though it was obviously topped with plenty of whipped cream and nuts, the base of the vanilla ice cream sundae was a massive quantity of caramel and chocolate sauce - so much that we could properly apportion spoons full of ice cream with caramel and chocolate without running out of any of the ingredients. Like the mint syrup, the chocolate and caramel weren't the strongest flavored sauces we'd ever tasted, but they were nonetheless very satisfying, and there was so much ice cream here that we wound up leaving part of the Turtle - basically, the ice cream - unfinished. Unlike the candy at Antoinette's, which struck us as a little expensive for the price, these sundaes were so big and loaded with goodies that we felt almost entirely satisfied spending the $5 to $6 for them. If the flavors were just a little stronger, we would have been in heaven.

That having been said, the chocolate milkshake we ordered from Antoinette's on our first visit wasn't exactly thrilling. Apparently made with vanilla ice cream as a base and chocolate syrup as a flavoring, we found it to be less intense in chocolate flavor than we'd hoped, though it was served in a very large cup - a reasonable portion for the $4 asking price. Antoinette's offers a wide variety of flavors at this price, as well as "double-thick" versions for $5, with malt and other variations selling at a similar premium.

From our perspective, the appeal of Antoinette's is fairly obvious: it's an ice cream shop - specifically, a sundae specialist - first, and a candy shop second, with just enough semi-novel items to merit a sample or two. We're bigger fans of the Sponge Candy at Watson's, and get a lot more excited over the chocolates at Alethea's, but we'd surely visit Antoinette's before most other local places for the sundaes. Only King Condrell's in Kenmore offers a definitively crazier selection of different parfaits, and even then, the dishes are smaller. Competing chain options such as Cold Stone and Dairy Queen are more numerous and sometimes very appealing, though rarely as excessive on the toppings as these old-fashioned ice cream parlors. Regardless of which of these places you prefer, you're sure to wind up with a great sundae - just be sure you have enough appetite to make the most of what you order.