Ideas
Nick made ice cream for 10.5 hours straight so we could pull off our first 24-hour party. Enjoying these behind-the-scenes stories? Tap ❤️ and share this someone else who might enjoy them, too.
A month or two ago at a conference, one of my ice cream friends asked me if it bothered me when people claimed to be the first to do something. She questioned the validity of someone receiving credit for being the first to create a dish. We were talking about James Hemings, the enslaved chef trained in French-style cuisine and owned by Thomas Jefferson, who received credit for having perfected French-style vanilla ice cream in the 1780s.
Image: With very little sleep, I pulled myself together after the late night party and early store opening to head to News Nation to talk about the company during their National Ice Cream Day afternoon segment.
Was he the first? Who knows, but he was the first to have received credit. Maybe there were others who had done similar work but didn’t have access to a platform to amplify it. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but executing them—and having them be remembered—is where the real work happens. Do you know how many people told me they’d had the same idea to open an ice cream shop in Harlem when we opened? A lot. But the idea is just the beginning. Clarifying one’s vision, assessing the available resources to bring the idea to life, doing just that, and having a platform to broadcast the accomplishment—that’s what sets ideas apart from each other. And once the idea is executed, refining it is the next step.
For the last six to eight weeks, I’d been talking about wanting to throw a 24-hour ice cream party for National Ice Cream Day, which was yesterday. I was inspired by another ice cream shop—whose name I can’t remember—doing this very thing when they spoke about it at our national industry conference last November. Historically, we haven’t done much more than stay open on these kinds of ice cream holidays, but over the last couple of years we’ve begun putting more effort into them.
When I shared my idea with Nick, he reminded me that we’d actually be open for 36 hours if we went from 12 pm Saturday to 11 pm Sunday, which would be tricky. I wanted us to stay open all night into the next morning. I wanted delivery drivers picking up orders at 2:45 am, because while New York City is the city that never sleeps, post-COVID it feels like it’s passed out on the couch after midnight. I wasn’t sure how we’d pull this off between staffing and ice cream production, especially since we’d been in the weeds all summer. But I just kept putting one foot in front of the other to get us closer to the day.
I ended up reaching out to a party promoter I’d worked with last year to help promote an after-hours party from 11:30pm to 2:30am. I booked one of our scoopers—an excellent DJ—to spin, and it was a whole vibe. People were two-stepping to the music and chatting with friends over our Harlem-inspired nutcracker popsicles and ice cream. One woman came up and thanked me for having the party, which had been on her list of ways to celebrate her birthday weekend with her family. The Saturday rainstorms had ruined the rest of her plans, and our late-night party was the only thing she was able to do. I asked her a couple of times whether visiting the shop or coming to the party was actually the thing on her list. She said it was the party, and I about fell out—she’d seen it on our Instagram account. It never ceases to amaze me that when people see things on our account that I’m still working out in real time, they can’t tell that me and my ideas are literally making things up as we go. And what’s crazier is that our 12am–1am sales hour was one of our highest on Sunday.
No one realized we were still finalizing the menu the day before, and Nick made ice cream for 10.5 hours that Saturday to deliver on what we’d promised for the evening and the morning. After we dropped the ice cream off at the store hosting the party, he retired for the night and didn’t re-emerge until 7:30am, when he left to pick up the Ice Cream for Breakfast flavors he’d made for Sunday’s menu—the Somali porridge with cardamom was the best.
Image: Pint of Mishaari, a Somali porridge made with honey, ghee, sorghum, cardamom, and black pepper. It is perfect.
Earlier in the week, a couple of other menu ideas had come to me: I asked Dell’Aria coffee roasters to provide the cold brew for our cold brew floats, and Anjali’s Cup chai for our chai floats. That morning, Anjali and I were making content to promote her chai for the float. It was very touch and go, but we pulled it off.
The imperfect execution on these ideas proved a great start for more robust programming down the line. As we refine how we celebrate this ice cream holiday over the next few years, who knows—maybe we’ll be cited as the first to host a 24-hour ice cream party in New York City, thanks to some media platform crediting it as such. But as we know, ideas are like white dandelions: they blow in lots of directions and germinate into new ones. Our 24-hour party won’t have been the first, but it will be the only one of its kind—and that will be thanks to our unique spin on things and how our audience tells the story of their experience with us.
Petrushka
Your Local Ice Cream Lady & Life/Business Coach