The best ice cream & dessert in Esplanade, according to people who actually live here.
The university quarter — student canteens, cheap-and-good lunches, and a campus rhythm that empties in August.
San Diego doesn't need an excuse to eat ice cream — the weather does that work for you every single day of the year. With 101 spots spanning everything from Mexican-inspired paletas and churro-dipped soft serve to Japanese mochi and properly scooped artisan ice cream, this city has quietly built one of the more interesting dessert scenes on the West Coast. It helps that the SoCal produce game is serious here: expect real fruit, local dairy, and flavors that actually taste like the thing they're named after.
The scene clusters in predictable but reliable spots. Mission Beach and Pacific Beach run hot on nostalgia and volume — good soft serve, cold treats after a long day in the sun, no pretension. North Park is where the more interesting stuff tends to happen: small-batch operations, rotating seasonal flavors, the kind of joint where the person scooping your cone made the ice cream that morning. Gaslamp is fine if you're already there; University City punches above its weight thanks to a strong Asian dessert influence — shaved snow, mochi, boba-adjacent everything.
One honest caveat: San Diego isn't doing anything that will make Los Angeles jealous. But that's almost the point. The dessert scene here is confident without being showy, and on a 75-degree evening in February, a well-made scoop of something cold hits different.