It exists. The ice cream store your great-great-grandmother would open, if she were still alive, God rest her soul. It's Gracie & the Dudes, and it's in Sea Bright.

Just a couple of years old, the shop has a fiercely loyal following due to one simple rule that permeates the place, and that rule is integrity. Yes, in today's crass world, and yes, right here at the Shore.

Owners and parents (of the shop's namesakes plus their youngest, Sadie), Brian and Michelle McMullin formerly owned ice cream and Italian ice franchises. Their new shop is a refinement of what they took away from the experience. High fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors and colors, and the air usually added to ice cream to increase volume were not invited to this party. What was: ingredients in their truest, nature-made best.

This means when you take a spoonful of blackberry Italian ice, you're tasting blackberries, sugar and water. If you're not used to 100% purity, you're in for a wonderful sweetness followed up by a POW of tanginess. Their deliriously-yummy hot Bourbon caramel sauce, hot fudge sauce, hard and soft ice cream and yogurt, the cookies for their memorable cinnamon oatmeal cookie ice cream, granola—all are their own, made without funky junk.

And if your socks aren't entirely knocked off: they make their own waffle cones. Sometimes they bring the machine out front and make them before your eager little eyes, and serve them to you warm. The ice cream will melt a bit sooner, but it's the cause that matters.

Good luck finding another ice cream place on the Shore (cough-anywhere?) with this level of devotion; you'll want to go just because it's a luxury to enjoy frozen treats with such honest flavors and textures. They're surprisingly well priced, too. So that's the tangible end of the business, what you wipe off your chin when you leave.

But there's a bonus, the intangible end. Because while quality counts, there's more to running a successful business than putting a good product out there. The McMullins' goal is to educate customers and their jaded taste buds to pureness of flavor; they make a point to try to learn customers' names; and they offer as many tastes as you'd like, simply because they want you to make an informed choice.

What a happy paradox: you'll leave cooler…and warmer.