100 years of Rainbow Cone’s wonderful weirdness

The Original Rainbow Cone looks less like a dessert than a dare.

Chocolate, strawberry, Palmer House and pistachio almond ice creams, crowned with orange sherbet are sliced and stacked into a gravity-defying tower of cool, colorful confection.

To generations of Chicagoans, the first Rainbow Cone of the season means summer has arrived. Like Riverview, Comiskey Park or the old Maxwell Street Market, the Rainbow Cone occupies a permanent place in the city’s collective memory. But unlike those vanished Chicago institutions, Rainbow Cone is still here and, as it celebrates its centennial, it’s more visible and accessible than ever.

The cone’s five flavors sing in improbable harmony. Chocolate establishes the bass note, rich and deep with a trace of bitterness. Strawberry brightens the composition with fresh, tart fruitiness. Palmer House, a mellow vanilla studded with cherries and walnuts, adds sweetness and texture. Pistachio almond provides a restrained, almost savory contrast. Topping it off, orange sherbet cuts through the richness with a clean burst of citrus, both palate cleanser and finale.

Joe and Katherine Sapp opened their ice cream shop in 1926 near 92nd Street and Western Avenue in Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood. At the time, families regularly traveled to this part of the city to visit nearby cemeteries, including Mount Greenwood, Mount Olivet, St. Casimir, Holy Sepulcher and Mount Hope.

For cemetery visitors, a stop at Rainbow Cone became part of a Sunday ritual, a cheerful reward after a solemn family obligation.

Lynn Sapp, Joe and Katherine’s granddaughter, said that serving the after-cemetery crowd gave Rainbow Cone “its legs as a family event and special treat.” Because the shop charged 12 cents for a cone at a time when many U.S. manufacturing workers earned roughly 55 to 60 cents an hour, she said, “It just had to be very good.”

And it was.

Part of the attraction came from the cone’s unlikely engineering. A conventional semicircular scoop would have produced a perilously unstable tower. So, Joe Sapp, toolmaker as well as ice cream entrepreneur, designed a special slicing scoop that laid down broad, flat layers that rested against one another like brightly colored tectonic plates. The design helped the cone withstand a flurry of summer afternoon licks and nibbles.

Continuity is a large part of the cone’s appeal, and Rainbow Cone was wonderfully weird from the beginning. It remains so today.

In 1926, most Americans had to be content with vanilla, chocolate or strawberry. Joe Sapp stacked five flavors into one extravagant South Side cone with chunks of fresh fruit and nuts. His Beverly shop also presented an unusual personality, and its unmistakable pink exterior became a South Side landmark, cheerful in a way that resists embarrassment.

Rainbow Cone became a community destination for more than just ice cream. Ever the good business owner, Joe Sapp landscaped a green space near the store where guests could listen to broadcast news and watch live performers like the “Rainbow Hotshots,” a family quartet.

Rainbow Cone was an early participant in a continuing Chicago tradition of unconventional foods created far from the city’s fine dining districts. Taffy grapes are fresh green grapes covered in a sweet coating and rolled in nuts. You can find them at places like the steak and lemonade shops on the South and West sides. The Jim Shoe sandwich, another South Side creation, piles corned beef, roast beef and gyro meat onto a submarine roll, then adds cheese, giardiniera and a thin, tzatziki-like sauce. These distinctive and truly delectable inventions, like Rainbow Cone and many more, sprang from the adventurous spirit of the South and West sides.

Rainbow Cone in the suburbs

Get your five-slice stack of nostalgia at suburban locations in Glendale Heights, Gurnee, Lombard, Mount Prospect, Kildeer, Skokie, Darien, Bolingbrook and Lakemoor.

Info: rainbowcone.com

Chicago’s James Beard Award winners and Michelin-starred restaurants are concentrated largely downtown on the North Side. Many of the city’s most original foods, however, emerged from modest, family-run establishments with limited resources and considerable ingenuity, where cooks and owners took what was available and turned it into something distinctive and delicious.

That local devotion eventually carried Rainbow Cone beyond Beverly.

“My goal was to get Rainbow Cone out to the rest of the city, and that’s why I started doing Taste of Chicago,” Lynn Sapp said. “People on the South Side knew who we were, but the North Side didn’t. Taste of Chicago really helped us grow.”

She opened a Navy Pier location in 2016. Rainbow Cone later partnered with the Buona Beef family, opening shops and kiosks and adding Rainbow Cone counters at select Buona restaurants. The dessert is now available at approximately 30 locations. A small fleet of Rainbow Cone trucks circulates around the city, trackable on the Rainbow Cone app.

“They’re two iconic Chicago brands, so it was a natural fit,” said Buona Beef’s John Buonavolanto. “We were able to modernize a lot of processes. The big change was adding Rainbow Cone into select Buona Beef locations. Success, for me, is remaining true to the Rainbow Cone brand and history.”

Expansion always carries risks for a beloved neighborhood institution. Make too many changes and the original identity disappears. Change too little and the business may not survive. Rainbow Cone’s challenge has been to grow without smoothing away what made it memorable.

Meanwhile, the rest of the ice cream world has moved closer to Rainbow Cone’s old-time sense of ice cream adventurism. According to a 2022 McKinsey & Company report, more than 400 new ice cream flavors had launched over a single four-year period. Such rapid invention leads to some truly bizarre flavor combos, including Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Ice Cream and Bone Marrow with Smoked Cherries. No kidding. Weirdness sells.

Chicagoans can celebrate Rainbow Cone’s century at the Museum of Ice Cream Chicago, where the South Side original will be featured through Aug. 3. Interactive displays explore the history and science behind a dessert that is one of Chicago’s first iconic foods.

Rainbow Cone is an edible expression of the city that created it, a city that reversed a river, raised streets to lay down a sewer system and erected skyscrapers on a swamp. The “City that Works” seems always to have preferred audacity to convention.

For 100 years, Rainbow Cone has audaciously survived fashions, recessions, wars, pandemics and waves of social transformation. Through it all, the five slices have remained the five slices: daringly stacked, wonderfully weird and unmistakably Chicago.