INSTEAD of peanut M&Ms, think Tumbador’s PB&J chocolate bar, handmade in Sunset Park. Instead of Häagen-Dazs, think Blue Marble ice cream. Instead of Tostitos, chips from the Brooklyn Salsa Company. This is the new Barclays Center, home of the Brooklyn Nets with food about as local as stadium fare gets….

The final selection is a mix of Brooklyn standbys like Nathan’s Famous and L&B Spumoni Gardens and newer artisan entrepreneurs including McClure’s Pickles, Brooklyn Cupcake and Calexico.

– Sophie Brickman, N.Y. Times.

Good read from the Times on the food that’ll be available at the Barclays Center. It’s probably worth noting that local businesses who hook up with Ratner and the arena risk alienating some portion of their existing customer base, since there are a lot of people in the area pretty upset about the arena’s construction.

As for the food: I can’t vouch for all of it, as the Brooklyn foodscape changes pretty rapidly. But I can say that McClure’s Pickles and Calexico are delicious, and Blue Marble ice cream is without a doubt the best ice cream I’ve ever had.

A Blue Marble opened up on Underhill Avenue in Prospect Heights when I lived around the corner on Lincoln Place. It seemed like a pretty random spot for an upscale free-range grass-fed fair-trade type ice-cream spot at the time, on a block dotted with old Chinese-food places, shabby bodegas and empty storefronts that appeared to be storage spaces for people’s random old electronics.

Since there were so few places to get food in the immediate vicinity I went to check it out soon after it opened. About one spoonful in, I realized it was better than any ice cream I had ever tasted in my entire life. It’s so unbelievably creamy and tasty, but not greasy or heavy in the way that Coldstone Creamery’s ice cream is. A couple days later I spotted my friend who lived around the block on her way out of Blue Marble with a cup of it, and at first she was kind of cagey and acted like she was just trying it for the first time. But when I said it was the best ice cream I had ever had she admitted she felt the same way, and copped to the fact that she had already been there three times in the week since it had opened.

So check that out, is what I’m saying.