So, how is the Museum of Ice Cream, Boston compared to other fun museums around the world? Is it worth it for the price and time? What tips are there to make the most of a visit there for kids and adults alike? Read this review to find out!
First, some background: I’m not affiliated with the Museum of Ice Cream in any way, and I paid for the tickets for my 9 year old food-loving daughter and myself to enter, meaning I can be completely honest in this review…
Museum of Ice Cream Review
Here is the advice about visiting the Museum of Ice Cream in Boston that I wish someone had told me before I went (just as I was so thankful a friend tipped me off to Randyland in PA)…
1. Ticket prices change by demand. Plan ahead to save money!
When my daughter first started agitating for us to visit the Museum of Ice Cream in Boston after it opened in 2024, I bopped onto their website to buy tickets and found they were… $50 each?! Yipes! That’s even more expensive than the gorgeous Chihuly Garden and Glass museum in Seattle, Washington, which is world-renowned!
“Let’s just wait until the price goes down,” I sighed to my daughter, noticing that the cost fluctuated hourly with demand. “Maybe it will even become free like Bicycle Heaven in Pittsburgh!” (Wishful thinking…)
The day we wanted to go to the museum arrived, and I opened the website — only to find that the ticket price had gone up to… $73 each?!!! Holy WHAT?! That’s almost FIVE times the price of entry to the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, MA!
Since the timed tickets for the Museum of Ice Cream in Boston were sold out for the day and only “VIP Anytime Tickets” left (and no tickets are sold last-minute at the door), it would cost us over $230 with taxes and fees for a family of three to go. NOOO THANK YOU!!! As my friend later chuckled, with two hundred dollars in your pocket, you could just buy mounds of random ice cream around the Boston for weeks instead.
Mercifully, the tickets sold out right as we were looking at the screen, meaning I couldn’t buy any at all for that day — despite pleading from certain children that this would be even cooler than Sturbridge Village, and they wanted to go nooooooooooow. Ah well.
Learning from this lesson, when we picked a new date to try to go to the Museum of Ice Cream, I logged onto the site a full month in advance and picked a less popular date and time, meaning I was able to snag tickets that “only” cost $28 each… Still pretty ridiculous (and still more expensive than the beloved MASS MoCA modern art museum in North Adams, MA) — but better than $73 a pop.
2. Pick an early time slot. Parts of the museum are small.
Speaking of picking your entry time slot, I strongly urge you to get a timed ticket for 10am — right as the Museum of Ice Cream opens — as we did. Though it may seem odd to eat ice cream that early, you’ll get over that decadence quickly (frankly, my daughter and I could eat American, Italian, or Turkish ice cream at 5am ANY old day), and there are important reasons you’ll want to be in the building first…
Why? Though the main entry hall to the museum (which is also the area you end the tour) is relatively large, most of the rest of the Museum of Ice Cream, Boston has pretty tight spaces… which feel increasingly crowded as more people arrive over time, despite timed and size-limited tours. (This is in notable contrast to “classic” museums like the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Central MA, which provide plenty of space to spread out.)
For example, though the Museum of Ice Cream, Boston boasts “14+ play spaces,” several of those spaces are just hallways narrower than those in the famed Fallingwater house (see the photo above), and others become challenging to maneuver depending on the movement of your tour group.
Further, though the extremely kind staff works diligently to keep everything clean and hygienic, the volume of visitors that pour through each day means that visits timed for earlier in the morning might have at least a sliiiightly lower concentration of germs! (This becomes less of an issue in a museum like the Cathedral of Learning with sky-high ceilings, and fewer hands-on activities…)
3. Take your time. The Museum of Ice Cream goes quickly.
Unfortunately, unlike a visit to the Clark Museum in Williamstown, MA which can be savored for hours, a person really can rush through the Museum of Ice Cream in Boston in 30 minutes, because it’s not large. Further, there’s sort of an incentive to rush, because you keep wanting to see what’s in the next room! For this reason, it’s hard to focus on one room and really take advantage of what’s in it.
For example, the first “play space” has a lot of sliding panels that you pull out to learn ice cream history… but few people were in the mood to do that educational piece (unlike the Fred Rogers Center, which elicits focus) since we all wanted to peek at the subsequent space. See a photo of the sliding panels, below, and decide if you would want to stand there and read that while others push past to get to a possible new ice cream sample in the subsequent room…
Here’s the problem with this urge to move forward in rooms rapidly: Unlike other museums (like the spectacular Corning Museum of Glass in the Finger Lakes region of NY) where you can do a quick overview and then circle back to the parts you want to revisit, it’s actually quite difficult (and discouraged) to go backwards in the route through the Museum of Ice Cream.
This means that you’re sort of stuck with regret at the end of the museum if you rushed through. Yes, because you finish the tour in the same place as you start, we probably could have done another loop with the new tour group that was just beginning their journey, but at that point (11am) the crowds were getting so swollen that it felt wrong to add to their ranks. (In contrast, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, I went back to this Quilts and Color exhibit over and over!)
Luckily, you can linger in that main Museum of Ice Cram area — and the slide down to the sprinkle pool — for an unlimited amount of time. This is in the museum’s interest, because that area has ice cream and food that you need to pay extra for (unlike the Westmoreland Museum of American Art which is totally free)! Speaking of what’s included and what’s unlimited…
4. Is the ice cream unlimited? Not exactly. Here’s a summary…
Alas, the idea of the Museum of Ice Cream having unlimited ice cream is a little erroneous. Sure, it’s technically of possible to keep noshing if you work at it… and ignore decorum — but let’s walk through exactly what we ate during our visit to see why it ended up not being unlimited dessert.
First, right as you walk in (after making a name tag with your chosen ice cream-themed name), you’re greeted by a jolly staff member in a Friendly’s uniform — ahh, the restaurant of my youth! — who offers an excellent choice of ice cream popsicles. I chose fudge brownie, and my daughter got cherry fudge. There was also cookie dough and caramel cone flavors. These were tasty!
We devoured that ice cream pop while walking through the main hall and entering the first room, which has the educational pull-out posters about ice cream. Next up was the “Creamliner” in which you sit in a faux airplane and watch a screen that is ice cream-related and somewhat hypnotic.
At the end of the Creamliner experience, a “flight attendant” wheels around some truly delicious and highly creamy soft-serve which in our case was pineapple flavored, and very thick. This one was my favorite, and it was so rich that even my sweet-loving little girl couldn’t finish hers.
After a “Hall of Freezers” (in which the attraction is you can walk in and out of the doors along the wall and presumably take funny photos), we walked through a narrow, kind of awkward kitchen space, and emerged into a place with a plastic cookie couch which featured a screen you can project onto, and a bell you could ring for a rotating trap door in the wall to produce a tiny cookie with marshmallow (ice cream?) in the middle.
That was a pretty tasty bite. Did my girl ring the bell over and over to get several tiny cookies to pop into her mouth? Yes. But soon our tour group pushed forward.
Then there was a hallway with magnetized letters to make words, a play space where you make up ice cream flavors to feed to plastic monkey, and a pretty hallway with arched rainbow lights (my favorite photo op of the bunch). Ultimately we ended up in the large game room called “Funway Park” where you can play Skee Ball and other games that involve throwing bring red plastic orbs.
This room had cotton candy, which my daughter wanted thirds of! Know that families could likely spend at least half an hour having their kids play in “Funway Park,” as it’s a big space with a wide choice of active games.
The final room is the “Flavor Lab” with a serving of an odd flavor, which in our case was “Lobster Flavored Ice Cream” — which I suspect was just cream flavor dyed slightly pink. Overall it was tolerable, and not as awful as I feared. (High praise!) Then you’re back in the main hall, where the subsequent sweets all cost money!
So, yes, I suppose you could linger in a room and keep getting servings of that room’s ice cream… but it’s difficult to do, because it would require detaching from your tour group, which is steadily moving forward through the rooms, and discouraged from doubling back.
5. The slide and sprinkle pit were kid highlights.
Though you’re shuttled through the smaller individual rooms at a pretty brisk pace, you are allowed to linger in the main hall for much longer — and that was great for my daughter, because she was OBSESSED with the big red slide that goes through the floor and into the “sprinkle pit” below that’s filled with giant pink plastic fake sprinkles!
The Museum of Ice Cream sprinkle pit is one of its central features, and the very patient staff led a game of “find the hidden banana in the sprinkles” for the kids in the pit every few minutes, much to every child’s delight.
One safety warning I’d give (besides your child taking a good shower after the museum) is that the sides of the pool are hard tile, and there was more than one kid trying to dive backwards and almost bumping their noggin! Use caution — and enjoy.
6. Plan what you wear strategically.
Important note: There is no coat check at the Museum of Ice Cream in Boston, so I suggest bringing as few items as possible. We wore very light jackets, and brought a backpack to place the coats in while we walked around — so our hands were free for ice cream!
Now, what color to wear to the museum? Given that I wrote a whole article about packing dresses for travel photos, I confess I think a lot about what attire will provide the best photographic outcome. Here are some tips on what to wear.
The first piece of advice for dressing for the Museum of Ice Cream is to NOT wear pink or red, as you’ll just blend into the zillions of pink, red, and magenta walls and floors and tables everywhere! Because the opposite of pink and red is green, I would suggest wearing a cool color like green, teal, blue, or even bluish purple or white so you stand out with delightful contrast for the camera lens.
Further, solid colors will look better in the pictures since the museum is such a patterned space. We didn’t take this advice, and ended up putting a boldly printed dress on my daughter that’s brighter than this glass paperweight collection. Whoopsie!
7. Expect… interesting photographic conditions.
Be prepared for two other challenges to photography at the Museum of Ice Cream, Boston beyond the risk of accidentally wearing pink and blending in with the walls. First you’ll be holding ice cream in your hands to eat for most of the visit, so that doesn’t leave a lot of hand bandwidth to snap photos! Leverage the flat surfaces around or your travel buddies to hold your treats while photographing.
Second, the light in the museum is quite challenging — unlike the sun-drenched Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. At the MOI, the bulbs are mostly dim or fluorescent, and pink paint is everywhere — meaning you may need to adjust the white balance for the photos afterwards, or use a higher-end camera to get pictures that aren’t overly grainy or red-cast.
8. Despite all that, the Museum of Ice cream did provide a magical and exciting feeling!
Even though I would obviously recommend a classic museum like the the Children’s Museum, Science Museum, or Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (click to see photos from the fascinating “Fashioned by Sergeant” exhibit) over the Museum of Ice Cream any day of the week, I WILL say that my daughter and I ended up having a really magical day — party buoyed by the pure whimsey of the space. But what took it to the next level is what we did next…
9. Take this walk through downtown Boston after the museum!
Sure, the Museum of Ice Cream is… interesting, but you know what is potentially even cooler? A walk from the MOI through beautiful and historic downtown Boston!
Simply walk west on Summer Street and then you can enjoy the views of Fort Point Channel, Dewey Square, Downtown Crossing, the Boston Common, Boston Public Garden (yay for the Emerald Necklace Parks System!), Newbury Street, and the Boston Public Library at Copley Square. We ended up walking over three miles, and enjoyed every moment. I love our city!
Review: Is the Museum of Ice Cream, Boston Worth It?
So, is the Museum of Ice Cream in Boston worth $75 a person? NO. Not at all. Wait until you can snag tickets under $35 (still more expensive than the stunning Phipps Conservatory, which is crazy!), and then the museum is maybe good for a solid hour of fun — especially for the kids involved. For the adults, you will likely be like “Whaaaaaaat??” for much of the experience… but it’s not the worst way you could spend a morning.
If you’ve been to the Museum of Ice Cream (either in Boston, or in any of its other locations like Chicago, Miami, or New York City), what was your experience? If you haven’t been yet, what questions do you have? Do share!
The author, Lillie Marshall, is a 6-foot-tall National Board Certified Teacher of English, fitness fan, and mother of two who has been a public school educator since 2003. She launched Around the World “L” Travel and Life Blog in 2009, and over 4.2 million readers have now visited this site. Lillie also runs TeachingTraveling.com and DrawingsOf.com. Subscribe to her monthly newsletter, and follow @WorldLillie on social media!