Patty Lee of Zagat checked out a brand new ice cream shop that's churning out some unusual flavors. She filed the following report for NY1.
After two years of scooping at markets and festivals across New York City, the Vendy Award-winning ice cream makers behind Ice & Vice have finally found a permanent home on the Lower East Side.
“We do high-end ice creams with 16 percent butterfat and very little air. We do crazy flavors. We’re kind of introducing something that hasn’t really been seen in New York before," say Kendrick Lo, Co-Owner of Ice and Vice.
Oddball combos are the stars here, with unusual ingredients like buttered popcorn and bacon popping up in the ice creams and sorbets.
“We do a lot with infusions, we do a lot with spices, we do a lot with teas,” Lo says.
“We do push the boundaries with our flavors, like Marcona almond, we pair that with a grape Koolaid jam," says Paul Kim, Co-Owner of Ice and Vice.
“You’re not going to go to the supermarket and see these flavors,” Lo adds.
As the menu expands, they plan to team up with local businesses they have encountered along the way.
“A lot of what we’re going to release in the future are collaborations that we’ve had with other market vendors. So for example, our soda floats - which is the next phase of our menu - is a vendor that we met at the markets called Renegade Lemonade. We’ll be working with them to create custom soda syrups,” Lo says.
Just as eclectic as their frozen treats is the shop, which mixes old elements with new ones.
“We kept the ceiling from the 1800s. This bench was made from the original counters. We want to be the next phase and the next step of ice cream and we wanted our branding to reflect that,” Kim says.
We started with the Nuts of Wrath, which is the toasted Marcona almond with the Kool-Aid grape jam. The ice cream is nice, nutty, and super creamy, and the Kool-Aid jam is surprisingly not overwhelming and brings a little bit of nostalgia.
Next, we tried the Three Little Pigs. You can definitely taste the salted caramel flavor. You also get a lot of the bacon and it is nice and smoky and kind of rounds out the sweetness. So bacon in ice cream probably isn’t going to become as popular as cookies and cream, but it is really delicious.
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