Tasty Creme of Library is a South Hills soft-serve staple

If a child plays a sport for the Bethel Park or South Park school districts, there’s a good chance their parents take them to the Tasty Creme of Library after a game. At its busiest, folks fill up the inside, and there's line out the door.

“These kids that come in there, the smiles on their face,” co-owner Donna Stanton says. “I don’t have a bad day.”

This humble seasonal ice cream shop in South Park, right next on the border with Bethel Park, has solidified itself throughout decades of business as a favorite of local sports families and the community as a whole.

Located off of Library Road (a portion of Route 88 south of Pittsburgh), this family business offers a wide variety of ice cream and other sweet treats. It’s small and has picnic tables outside for seating — on a busy day, the indoor lobby gets pretty crowded. It doesn’t operate from mid-October through mid-March, only accepts cash, and competes with a Dairy Queen about 10 minutes down the road, but Tasty Creme still manages to be beloved by locals.
The shop offers soft-serve and hard ice cream in addition to several Dole Whip flavors swapped out daily. Its parfaits, such as the Oreo Extreme and the new S’mores Parfait, sell the best, according to its owners Stanton and Kristen Hischar, mother and daughter.

Other offerings include ice cream dog treats, which resemble an ice cream sandwich made out of two dog biscuits. My wife Libby and I live nearby and pick these up for our dog Bentley during our visits. If we go on a day with orange Dole, I’ll get an orange-vanilla swirl cone (which, for my money, you just can’t beat) or otherwise a Patriotic Parfait (vanilla ice cream with strawberries and blueberries) or a banana split, and Libby usually opts for the Peanut Butter Zinger.

The business likes to try out new things and welcomes customer suggestions — the dog treats, for example, came out of a customer suggestion, Stanton says.

Stanton bought the business from previous owners about 10 years ago. Hischar remembers when she sat outside the business during the first week of ownership enjoying the ice cream with her daughter Mia and other members of the family.

“They just had ice cream dripping down their faces,” Hischar says, laughing.

Now, Mia, as well as two other grandkids of Stanton who share her last name, Josie and Madison, are teenagers and work at the shop. When Pittsburgh City Paper visited the shop, Stanton watched her grandkids make ice cream with a big smile on her face. ”This is why I like working here,” she says while watching.
Before, Stanton with her husband ran Schwartz Market grocery stores located in the city. Even though she said she would rather have a bag of potato chips than ice cream, running and working for the Tasty Creme has given her a better attitude, she says.

“I was not happy. I was not comfortable,” Stanton says. “I think circumstances in my personal life changed me, losing people that were close to me.”

Business has had its ups and downs over the years, Stanton says. Early on, they experimented with staying open during colder times of the year, but that didn’t pan out. And the business only accepts cash because paying fees throughout the year to accept cards would require Tasty Creme to raise prices higher than she wants.

“Every year it goes up a little bit,” Stanton says. “[But] last year was a very good year.”

Stanton loves her customers. She affectionately refers to two women who come every week as the “Friday Dole girls.”

“One day, they walked in, and I said, ‘You know, it’s not Friday,’” Stanton says. “It was Wednesday. I said, ‘yinz were really trying to confuse me.’”

And then there’s all of the young athletes who come for a congratulatory treat after a tough game. Because her own grandkids play sports, she’s become known to local kiddos and Grandma Stanton. She doesn’t always do it, she says, but sometimes she gives an athlete with a good day on the field a free ice cream as a reward.

“Who was it, Jack? Seven or eight?” Stanton says. “Comes in, has his first home run, and I says, ‘Oh, Jack, that’s great! Have ice cream on me.’ And he just lit up.”