The best American city for ice cream, surprisingly enough, is Milwaukee, where they serve frozen custard, a super-rich product enhanced by the use of egg yolks. But New York, with its mix of gourmet creameries, old-fashioned ice cream parlors, and exotic ethnic flavors, isn’t far behind. And now a new contender has arrived: Mary’s Dairy.

Mary’s is owned by an upstate dairy-farming family, but don’t expect to find any rustic salt-of-the-earth elements here. Although the shop is in the West Village, it feels more like an East Village or Williamsburg hipster playground, complete with a postmodern interior design, Japanese anime characters on the walls, and T-shirts with ironic slogans for sale. All of which would be really annoying if the ice cream ($3.25 for a small cone) weren’t so good. Standard flavors like chocolate, cookies and cream, and mint chocolate chip – super-rich, creamy, and full of fresh flavor – all leave the likes of Ben & Jerry’s in the dust. And the cappuccino kahlua is among the best coffee-based ice cream I’ve ever tasted. A rotating roster of additional flavors, highlighted by black raspberry, cinnamon pecan, and pumpkin, changes daily.

There are also four premium-priced “exotic” flavors ($5 for a small cone), although this is definitely an area where you should proceed with caution. If you don’t believe there can ever be too much of a good thing, you might think differently after trying ying yang, which is pretty much the richest, densest milk chocolate ice cream you can imagine, studded with bits of dark chocolate for good measure. “This is so rich, it’s almost toxic,” said one of my friends, sounding more pained than humorous. My group failed to finish a small ying yang cone – and there were four of us.

A better route to chocolate bliss is a hot-fudge sundae ($6), because Mary’s fudge is bittersweet and more complex than most. Those who insist on excess can go for the “Too Much Is Just About Enough!” sundae ($9), in which three scoops of your choice are perched atop a brownie, a large cookie, and a Krispy Kreme donut. If you can finish one of these, you no doubt have a promising future on the competitive eating circuit, or maybe on a reality TV show.

Mary’s location (171 W. 4th St.; 212-242-6874) places it in direct competition with another of the city’s premiere creameries, Cones Ice Cream Artisans, which is just around the corner (272 Bleecker St.; 212-414-1795). Founded in the late 1990s by a pair of Argentinian brothers, Cones serves gelato – native to Italy but also quite popular in Argentina – which has less butterfat and much less air than American ice cream and isn’t kept quite as cold. The result is a product that’s light, very creamy, and full of concentrated flavor.

“All the signs in our shop say, ‘ice cream,’ because people respond more to that term,” one of the brothers explained to me. “But it’s actually gelato.” In other words, they’ve dumbed it down for their American audience, but that all becomes moot once you taste the phenomenal flavors ($3.50 for a small cone),including the most spectacularly nutty pistachio and hazelnut in town.