St. Louis Snow Cone

The coolest food truck, the Snow Sled

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St. Louis Snow Cone already has the coolest food truck in town -- a 1957 Chevy van tricked out until it morphed into the Snow Sled. Might as well up the cool ante by adding a pop-up movie screen, classic movies and collaborations with a variety of St. Louis' newest food businesses.

That's what St. Louis Snow Cone is doing this summer with its Drive-In Movie and Car Cruise series. St. Louis Snow Cone also owns Clean Cut Creations, a vehicle modification and design shop that specializes in classic cars. Hence, the 54-year-old van-turned-snow cone truck.

Once a month from June through October, it's creating an Americana scene -- classic cars at the drive-in. It's also souping up the food. In addition to the snow cones with flavors tied in to each movie, it has worked with Frostbite Ice Cream and brand-new food truck Shell's Coastal Cuisine for concessions. Also, the Boy Scouts are selling candy and drinks.

Gut Check talked to co-owner Joann Kuehl about the makeshift drive-in theater.

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Dr. Freeze

The Sno Shack at Heege and MacKenzie Roads

​Ever since the dirigible accident that claimed his life, I have searched in vain for the head of my beloved uncle, Aeschylus Freeze.

It was Uncle Aeschylus who raised me after the death of my father, Dr. Freeze Sr., in the Snow Cone Air Drop Disaster of 1964. Uncle Aeschylus, too, was an aficionado of the snow cone, but if my father was Dionysus, attacking any and all snow cones with the ardor of a stud horse, then Uncle Aeschylus was Apollo, regarding each snow cone with a refined eye and unyielding standards of how ice should be shaved and syrup poured to elevate this frozen treat to a thing of sublime beauty.

Indeed, Uncle Aeschylus loved nothing more than to ask admittance to a snow-cone stand and study the workings of its ice-shaving machine, perhaps pointing how it could be recalibrated for a more delicate, snowflake-like result.

Alas, my uncle's mechanical expertise did not extend to dirigibles, and his homemade airship crashed shortly after its maiden launch into a neighbor's koi pond, killing my uncle (and a dozen koi) instantly. His body remained strapped into his cockpit seat. Yet where his head should be, a koi flapped feebly.

That head -- regal, even leonine -- we have never found.

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Dr. Freeze

Murray's Shaved Ice on Watson Road in Lindenwood Park

​World Cup aficionados might be interested to learn that, as a youth, I was quite the footballer. My introduction to the game was not the schoolyard pitch, mind you -- and it certainly was not the "rec league" of today's overprivileged, overscheduled miniature adults.

Each year, the entire Freeze clan would gather at my grandfather's farm for a week's Bacchanalia, the highlight of which was undoubtedly when the paterfamilias himself, Hieronymus Freeze, would ritually slaughter one of his prize sows for the Grand Feast that marked the gathering's climax. An early proponent of "nose-to-tail" eating, my grandfather would inflate the pig's bladder, fill it with vanilla custard and then give it to his grandchildren for a game of eight-on-eight footie.

(There were actually seventeen Freeze grandchildren, but poor Aloysius had contracted polio while recovering from tuberculosis at a sanatorium and was, alas, relegated to the role of spectator. One year, someone had the idea of making him the referee, but due to the aforementioned bout with TB, his whistles were too feeble to be heard, let alone obeyed.)

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Dr. Freeze

Southern Sno in Brentwood

​Greetings! Dr. Freeze here, lately returned on the red-eye bird from the 17th Annual International Conference on the Advancement of the Snow-Cone Arts in Davos, Switzerland -- just in time for the official start of snow-Cone season.

Yes, Memorial Day has come and gone (I pause to remember Dr. Freeze Sr., killed heroically while trying to air-drop a shipment of shaved ice on Omaha Beach -- unfortunately, it was 1964, the ice melted before anyone could find it, and my father ran out of fuel during the return flight and crashed his plane into the marshmallow-topping-white cliffs of Dover) and the rapscallions have been released from school, which means it's time to quench our existential thirst with a delicious snow-cone.

Won't you join me on a guided tour of the snow-cone stands of St. Louis?

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