Why 21 Choices Frozen Yogurt matters.
21 Choices Frozen Yogurt is an inventive dessert shop where Old Pasadena's independent commercial character meets house-made frozen yogurt, cold-slab customization and a concept created by brothers Gudu and Tony Husson during Southern California's first major frozen-yogurt era.
Set along North Fair Oaks Avenue near Colorado Boulevard and just steps from One Colorado, the frozen yogurt shop occupies the historic core of Old Pasadena between Memorial Park, the Raymond Avenue commercial blocks and Castle Green, with the Arroyo Seco opening west beyond Pasadena Avenue and the San Gabriel Mountains rising beyond the city to the north. Six frozen-yogurt flavors rotate through the counter each day, making the changing selection part of the shop's physical presentation before individual combinations are assembled. Staff fold fruit, candy, cookies, brownies, pretzels, nuts and other additions directly into the selected yogurt on a cold slab, making preparation itself the defining encounter. Scratch-made brownies, chocolate chip cookies and cookie dough deepen that format through ingredients produced specifically for incorporation into the frozen yogurt. The result is a Pasadena dessert shop whose rotating flavors, cold-slab mixing and unusually deep house-made repertoire preserve a personalized format developed decades before customizable frozen yogurt became ubiquitous.
What you didn't know 21 Choices Frozen Yogurt.
21 Choices Frozen Yogurt is best known for Gudu and Tony Husson's early frozen-yogurt concept, which was operating by 1989 and had already become distinctive enough for the brothers to seek federal protection for its name in 1990. The brothers chose 21 for its association with coming of age, giving the numerical name a meaning independent of the number of flavors available on a particular day. Baskin-Robbins challenged the mark in 1991 over its similarity to the company's 31 Flavors branding, beginning a dispute that ended with dismissal in 1993 and left the Hussons' 21 Choices mark intact. Gudu later brought the concept to his alma mater, USC, where a University Village location opened in August 2009 after more than two years of student efforts to bring the shop to campus. The Pasadena operation had developed a following well before that expansion, and the present Old Pasadena shop dates to 2011. The contemporary business has contracted to Pasadena and two Claremont locations, preserving the Hussons' original concept across three Southern California shops.
Organic strawberries and golden kiwis form one rotating non-dairy combination through oat milk made from scratch inside the shops, giving the fruit base a house-produced dairy substitute before freezing begins. Almond milk is likewise produced in-house, and both plant milks become foundations for vegan frozen-yogurt preparations assembled each morning. Manhattan Cheesecake takes the repertoire toward pastry-driven richness, and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough brings one of the shop's scratch-made mix-ins into the flavor itself. Earlier combinations have incorporated entire prepared foods into the yogurt base, including Blueberry Muffin made with blueberry muffins and Coffee, Coffee, Coffee using Stumptown Coffee. Fresh fruit, brownies, pretzels, animal cookies, nuts and candy then become another compositional layer when staff work selected additions through the frozen base on the chilled slab. That sequence makes customization more substantial than topping a finished cup, integrating baked goods, fruit, confectionery and house-made plant milks into both the yogurt itself and its final cold-slab composition.
How 21 Choices Frozen Yogurt fits.
21 Choices Frozen Yogurt works as the anchor for an outing connecting Pasadena's Gilded Age domestic culture with the city's defining Arts and Crafts residence and the museum where an industrialist's private collection merged with an institution central to postwar American art.
Begin at Pasadena Museum of History, founded as the Pasadena Historical Society in 1924 with a collection that initially occupied a single filing cabinet. Its holdings received a dedicated room inside the Civic Auditorium in 1932, moved to Pasadena Public Library in 1958 and reached the Fényes Estate in 1970 after a gift from the Paloheimo family. The estate centers on the 1906 Beaux Arts Fényes Mansion, designed by Robert Farquhar for artist and patron Eva Scott Fényes and physician and entomologist Adalbert Fényes. Sylvanus Marston added to the house in 1911, and much of Eva's furniture, decoration and art remains in place. Continue to The Gamble House, completed in 1908 for David and Mary Gamble of the Procter & Gamble family as the most complete surviving work of Charles and Henry Greene. The brothers designed the architecture and furnishings as a unified Arts and Crafts composition, working extensively in wood across the house and its custom furniture. The Gamble family transferred the property to Pasadena in 1966 through an agreement with USC, National Register recognition followed in 1971 and National Historic Landmark designation arrived in 1977. Conclude at Norton Simon Museum, whose institutional ancestry reaches to the Pasadena Art Institute founded in 1924. Ladd & Kelsey designed its 85,000-square-foot Pasadena Art Museum building, completed in 1969 with 115,000 exterior tiles by Edith Heath. Financial strain brought Norton Simon into the institution during the 1970s, and he assumed its obligations and management before installing a collection he had assembled since the 1950s. The museum reopened with Simon's holdings in 1975, bringing European paintings, South and Southeast Asian sculpture and twentieth-century art together with the Pasadena museum's existing collection. Frank Gehry later reworked the galleries beginning in 1995, raising ceilings, adding skylights and reshaping rooms around the collection. The progression moves from a family estate preserving Pasadena's early cultural life through the Greene brothers' extraordinary synthesis of architecture and craftsmanship and culminates inside a museum where private collecting and postwar institutional ambition produced one of the city's great concentrations of art.
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