By Polly Campbell
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Where to eat soft-serve:

This summer is getting off to such a slow start, there hasn't been much soft-serve eaten so far.

• "It's different this year," says Keith Wren, who owns the Cone in West Chester Township with his father, Ken. "Get a cloudy day and business is real slow. The minute it gets bright and sunny, we go gangbusters, so many people it's hard to manage it all."

Kids hit the Mount Healthy Dairy Bar for soft-serve ice cream. (Enquirer file photo)

What? It has to be hot before you can eat a parfait? I say, summer's short and you shouldn't be wasting any of it. Plus, when it isn't 90 degrees, your cones don't melt as fast.

You can't miss the Cone. It's a great big ice cream cone-shaped building on Tylersville Road that sells soft-serve in a variety of flavors. They do real strawberry soft-serve, made with frozen California strawberries. The signature cone is an orange and vanilla swirl, which outsells chocolate or chocolate and vanilla swirl.

New this year is a Buckeye parfait: a layered concoction of vanilla, peanut butter topping and miniature buckeye candies from Mackinaw Island.

The Cone, 6855 Tylersville Road, West Chester Township, 779-7040.

• This is the first summer at Putz's Creamy Whip without Grandma Putz. Gertrude Erhardt died in April. She had just turned 92, but was still working at her famous westside ice cream institution last summer.

Her granddaughter, Donna Borgman, and her husband, Jack, run Putz's, the only creamy whip store I've heard of to have a street named for it.

Soft-serve is selling slowly this year, but Putz's serves its own barbecue sandwiches, too, and plenty of coneys and other food.

2673 Putz Place, Westwood, 681-8668.

• At the Mount Healthy Dairy Bar, owner Tricia Brisker says they're lucky because they have lots of elementary schools and camps nearby.

"Kids don't care about the weather, " she says. "They'll walk up in the rain."

They also put in a drive-through two years ago, so that helps in gray weather.

For the drive-through customers, the Dairy Bar has a popular upside-down banana split, served in a cup with the sauces on the bottom, so it's easy to eat in the car.

For the kids, there's something called a Flavorburst that swirls flavored syrup with soft-serve vanilla. "Kids love that - anything with color - like blue cotton candy or green apple," Brisker says.

7840 Hamilton Ave., Mount Healthy, 522-1288.

E-mail pcampbell@enquirer.com