Hilltown Families 
Tasty Top ❥ Ice Cream in the Valley
Note 27, Tasty Top in Easthampton
Tasty Top in Easthampton, MA (Submitted photo).
While I have never made an exhaustive search nor done a scientific study, I am pretty confident that the following statement holds true: Tasty Top in Easthampton has the best soft serve ice cream in the Pioneer Valley. Please comment below if you disagree with the better option—and a description of why it’s better.
In my humble opinion, Tasty Top doesn’t taste plastic-y or fake or chemical-laden. It’s a bit rich compared to some soft serve ice creams. There are three flavors, vanilla and chocolate (of course) and black raspberry. Two of my kids (that’s half, by the by) swear by the black raspberry. I’m more chocolate or vanilla or chocolate and vanilla myself. My small gal is chocolate all the way.
Note, if you’ve never been there but plan to go: the servings are gigantic…
In its sixty-first and final (it seems pretty definite that construction will begin on the long-disputed Stop and Shop in this location) season, this is the moment to go if you are at all interested to see what the fuss—that’s to say is this the best soft serve in the Valley really—is all about or if you loved it as a child or a teen or last summer, whatever.
While there’s no question that strip of car dealership and CVS pharmacy and the rest isn’t pretty, when you sit at a picnic table and idly watch the folks with buckets of golf balls at the driving range just behind the ice cream shack—and it is an old-fashioned ice cream shack—and you see the mountains beyond the golf area, it’s very pretty. I feel sad to think of a supermarket—an ugly one at that—in front of the view. But there you have it. That’s what will be. Interviewed for the Daily Hampshire Gazette about the impending change with a dripping ice cream cone in hand a Northampton resident, Michael Crand, admitted to mixed feelings on the subject of the Stop and Shop. He noted the commercial district lacked aesthetics already. “But I guess it is a kind of loss of town character,” he said. “To lose the little ice cream shack.”
The only thing to do as far as I’m concerned is to eat some ice cream there while we still can.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah is a writer, who lives in Northampton with her husband and four children. She contributes to Preview Massachusetts Magazine, as well as other publications and writes a parenting blog Standing in the Shadows at the Valley Advocate. She moved to the Valley to attend Hampshire College—and found the Valley such a nice place, she stayed!
Roger’s in Chicopee, MA is great! Prices, size, taste! They also have yummy food including fried dough and fried dough sundaes!! Rudd’s in Holyoke is a good second choice or Cindy’s Drive-In in Granby. Yes Tasty Top is a loss to the customers, but the owners wanted to sell. It’s been the many other people fighting to keep Stop and Shop out. Big E’s will survive because it’s local, convenient and hasn’t had a problem with competing with Big Y, which is about the same distance.
I agree it will be a loss for Easthampton (though we find ourselves at Florence Soft Serve these days.) Sad, too, will be the loss of the BigE if Stop and Shop manages to kill the in-town grocery store.