Under the hot summer sun, an ice cream war is breaking out in the unlikely venue of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. First, Sweet Melissa Patisserie, a coffee and pastry shop, expanded into the building next door and opened what it called Sweet Melissa Cremerie. Then, right across the street, The Chocolate Room opened, promoting its own homemade ice cream. Both are siblings of Park Slope establishments, though neither the Seventh Avenue Sweet Melissa nor the Fifth Avenue Chocolate Room is known for ice cream.

Last summer, I reported for these pages on the ice cream district that had been established in Oak Bluffs, Mass. Could a similar phenomenon be in the works on Court Street? And how good are these ice cream establishments, anyway?

In search of answers I stopped first at Sweet Melissa, where it was clear from the labels on the ice cream containers inside the freezer that the ice cream in the “cremerie” was imported from Bassetts of Philadelphia. Not that a Pennsylvania connection is anything to turn one’s nose up at when it comes to ice cream. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield took a correspondence course in ice cream making from Penn State, and the ice cream maker at the acclaimed Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory at Fulton Ferry Landing is Pennsylvania-trained Mark Thompson.

But at $10.95 for a banana split, you might expect an attempt at Brooklyn-made ice cream. The hot fudge and the whipped cream here were better than the ice cream, which was limited to a selection of six flavors: strawberry, chocolate, coffee, pistachio, mint chip, and strawberry sorbet. What was billed as chocolate was actually double chocolate, according to the outside of the cardboard Bassetts container, which might account for its overpowering sweetness.

Things were more hopeful across the street, where I was greeted at the bar with a complimentary scoop of sorbet. Here, too, alas, the flavor selection was limited: Belgian chocolate, bourbon vanilla bean, strawberry, mint chip, and Sumatran coffee. A scoop of vanilla ice cream with hot fudge and whipped cream was $6, more than the $4.50 I paid across the street at Sweet Melissa. It had some of the same strengths and weaknesses; here, too, the hot fudge and whipped cream were outstanding and, alas, better than the ice cream. Here, too, the chocolate ice cream was overly sweet, and ice granules marred the texture of it, as well as that of the other flavors I sampled. I did spy on the counter a selection of freshly made chocolate chip and peanut butter-chocolate-chip sea salt cookies, which were top-notch. At 75 cents apiece for a respectable-if-not-Frisbee-sized cookie, they’re a bargain.

Ice cream is difficult to do well, which is why people import it from Pennsylvania rather than trying to make it themselves. It’s not impossible to do well, though. Passersby on Court Street may see Cobble Hill as an ice cream hot spot, but it’s actually a competition of two purveyors of excellent hot fudge and whipped cream slathered over ice cream that is not up to the level of its accompaniments. For now, those seeking the borough’s best scoops would be better off heading for the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, ideally on a rainy or cold weekday when the lines are short. They are also in good hands at Trois Pommes Patisserie on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, which makes its own better-than-Oreo cookies for the cookies-and-cream ice cream — and where you might find local farmer’s market rhubarb or strawberries in the sorbet.