My wife and I went to 3 Spoons after lunch today. Although the end result is similar, this is definitely a different experience than Cold Stone Creamery.
3 Spoons is a do-it-yourself dessert place, offering a wide variety of frozen yogurt flavors and toppings. There are 14 individual frozen yogurt flavors, all stacked together into the double-dispenser machines that let you get either flavor individually or as a swirl of both. Once you've selected the flavor(s) of frozen yogurt and poured it into your cup, you have as wide a variety of toppings to choose from. Once again, you do it yourself, scooping as little or as much as you want.
I found the flavors of frozen yogurt to be quite nice, with a wide variety. There was everything from thin mint cookies (chocolate / mint), to apple pie, and a giner-citrus flavor. These weren't just variations on the classic vanilla and chocolate, but distinct flavors with nothing being duplicated in any of the 14 slots.
The selection of toppings was quite impressive, too. They had the standard candy bars, chocolate chips and nuts. But they also had captain crunch, cocoa puffs and bits of Andes Mints. Honestly, had I looked at the available toppings first, I would have chosen a different flavor of yogurt... yes, that's right - I would have designed my dessert around the toppings. That's just how good the topping selection is.
Once you've created your masterpiece, you set it on a scale and pay by weight.
What I don't like, though, was the constant marketing of this being a "healthy" desert. Yes, they do put live yogurt cultures into their frozen yogurt and yes, this does have some health benefit. The frozen yogurt in general has fewer calories than an ice cream equivalent (often by half if you believe the marketing of 3 spoons) as well. However, there is still a ton of sugar in the yogurt and if you add even a small amount of toppings (other than the nuts), you are significantly increasing and possibly canceling out the benefit in comparison to ice cream.
The "cups" (bowls) the provide are also somewhat mis-leasing from a psychology perspective. There is only 1 size of bowl, which would be the largest size that Cold Stone offers, you are left to your own judgment about how much or how little to put in it. It's common in restaurants and food service to do this, because it makes you feel like you are getting a better value for money. In truth, though, you end up spending more on something that you need less of because of the psychological effects that the larger serving bowl has. When you have such a large bowl, it takes significantly more yogurt to make the bowl look it it has anything substantial in it, and thus you end up putting more in than you thought you did.
In the end, it was fun and tasty. I like the idea of being able to get any / all of the frozen yogurts and toppings, as I see fit. I hope they do well and I expect that I'll be back on a fairly regular basis.
