Bella Creamery

• 10098 Shaver Road
• Portage, MI 49024
• (269) 327-4057
• No Known Website
• No Online Menu

I love it when my wife suggests ice cream for dinner.

We were having another lazy Saturday.  J had taken a late nap because she had to work a rare Saturday morning.  When she woke up, she was hungry but not for dinner.  She was hungry for ice cream.

It was already pretty late in the day so the kids weren’t going to bed anytime soon.  We decided to take them for ice cream then we’d go play at the park for a while.  The ice cream didn’t have to be near the park and J suggested going to “that place we always see the billboard for.”

That billboard is on US-131 just south of Schoolcraft.  It’s for a Mancino’s Pizza & Grinders and Bella Creamery in Portage.

Bella Creamery shares a building with Mancino’s Pizza & Grinders on Shaver Road and Beethoven Road in the far southern tip of Portage.  The ice cream shop and the pizza place appear to be under the same ownership.  The name Bella Creamery appears to come from Bellacino’s which is what this Mancino’s in Portage used to be.

The ice cream portion of the building is tucked into a pretty small corner room.  There’s really only room for a small counter with the home made ice cream flavors lined up in two rows in a glass case.

Bella Creamery works a lot like Stone Cold Creamery.  You pick your flavor and then chose from their jars of mix-ins.  The employees use a steel scoop and a marble slab to work the ice cream and get the candy pieces mixed really well just like their much larger competitors.

We got three bowls of ice cream each with one mix-in.  J and I got the medium size bowls while L got the smallest.  The cost of the three treats was just under $14.

Once we got our ice cream, we headed outside to some metal patio furniture on the sidewalk.  There is a small seating area inside but it’s a counter connected to the walls at pub table height which isn’t really ideal with the two kids.

Lexi was the only one who really went wild with her ice cream selection.  She wanted mint because she wanted green ice cream but we know she doesn’t like mint so we talked her in to the Firecracker ice cream.  The ice cream is actually a mix of three flavors….wild cherry, sweet cream, and blue moon.  She went pretty easy with the mix-ins picking only some sprinkles to add to her ice cream.

J and I both went pretty simple.  We both ordered Sweet Cream ice cream, but we picked different mix-ins.

I picked the crushed Oreo’s making my ice cream essentially the middle of an Oreo Cookie.  The ice cream is very rich and creamy.  The cookies added a little bit of crunch and a little bit of chocolate to the sweet ice cream.

J added cookie dough pieces to her Sweet Cream Ice Cream.  All four of us were reaching our spoons in to J’s bowl.  The pieces of cookie dough were pretty large chunks that made the sweet ice cream even sweeter.

We spent about twenty minutes on a gorgeous Saturday evening at Bella Creamery.  It still doesn’t have that neighborhood ice cream shack vibe, but they do have delicious, rich, creamy ice cream that really rivals the larger chains.