What is Shakes & Cones?
Old Town has an ice cream parlor that everyone knows, the pink Sugar Bowl on Scottsdale Road. It also has a smaller one that the people with food allergies know. Rock N Robin’s Shakes & Cones is a walk-up window on First Street, a short block south of Main between Scottsdale Road and Brown Avenue, right next door to Bootleggers. It’s locally owned and family-run, and it has served soft serve to Old Town since 2014.
The difference is in the machine. The soft serve here is made from scratch daily in small batches, from the shop’s own recipes, with organic, non-GMO ingredients. It’s gluten-free and egg-free, with no additives or preservatives. The daily flavors are vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and a twist, plus a non-dairy vegan vanilla made with coconut milk, and the current menu adds a lemon sorbet. For a family with a celiac kid, a vegan teenager and a grandparent who just wants a cone, that covers everyone.
The shop takes allergies seriously without overpromising. Separate gluten-friendly and dairy-free menus label every item organic, gluten-free, non-dairy or vegan, with an asterisk on anything that needs modifying. The shop also says plainly that it isn’t a strict allergen-free kitchen and can’t guarantee against cross-contact. That honesty is worth more than a slogan.
It’s a window, not a parlor. You order, you take it to go, and Old Town is your dining room.
Ordering at the window
Start with a shake. The shakes are blended thick and topped with organic whipped crème. A malted in vanilla, chocolate or strawberry is the classic, and the specialty list goes further, with a carrot cake shake made with cake crumbles and organic cream cheese, and a seasonal shake of the month. In fall that means the returning pumpkin spice shake, which can be made dairy-free, vegan or gluten-free on request.
Or build a sundae. The organic banana split comes with your choice of three flavors (yes, Neapolitan is allowed), organic bananas and organic chocolate sauce. The fried soft serve parfait layers vanilla with cinnamon crunch, toasted crumbs, honey and caramel. The salted caramel cup, vanilla with organic caramel and Maldon sea salt, is the simple standout.
Mind the cone. Waffle cones, taco shells and bowls are made fresh and hand-rolled in the shop, and there’s a gluten-free cone. Toppings include a chocolate magic shell, Oreos, chopped nuts, organic sprinkles without dyes, and a house whipped crème in dairy or non-dairy.
For the non-ice-cream crowd. Old-fashioned floats and freezes use batch craft soda sweetened with cane sugar, in cola, root beer, Shirley Temple, dreamsicle, pink lemonade and lemon lime. There’s also organic espresso, Americanos and hot cocoa.
Timing. On weekdays the window opens in the late afternoon. On weekends it opens at midday and stays open into the evening. Evenings bring the after-dinner traffic from the restaurants on the surrounding blocks. DoorDash delivers within a few miles if you’re staying nearby, but the shop notes that delivery prices can run higher than at the window. Pints to go and catering are available too.
A window on First Street
First Street is one of Old Town’s oldest addresses and one of its least noticed. A block east of the window, at Brown Avenue, stands the Old Adobe Mission, the Our Lady of Perpetual Help church that Scottsdale’s Mexican American families finished in 1933, and the oldest church building still standing in town. For most of the twentieth century this was a quiet side street between the Western storefronts of Brown Avenue and the traffic of Scottsdale Road.
The block’s modern identity came from the corner. In October 1997, RA Sushi opened at Scottsdale Road and First Street, and its party-sushi happy hour made the block part of Old Town’s evening circuit. Karsen’s Grill, a few doors east, had served pub food there since 1991, and later arrivals such as Bootleggers next door turned First Street into a short, busy strip for dinner and drinks.
Shakes & Cones opened its window into that scene in 2014, in the 2010s boom that filled Old Town with new restaurants and bars. A from-scratch organic soft serve with a vegan option and labeled menus was an unusual idea for a tourist block, and it has kept the shop going for more than a decade while bigger neighbors came and went. RA Sushi closed in August 2025 after 28 years, and STK Steakhouse reopened the corner that October.
The family-run window is now one of the longer-running businesses on its block. Like the Sugar Bowl a few blocks north, it has lasted by doing one thing and doing it consistently, here soft serve made from scratch every day.