Ice & Vice Begins Scooping Ice Cream at Noon Today

You can stop pressing your nose to the glass, looking longingly inside the new gourmet ice cream shop at 221 East Broadway. Ice & Vice opens today at noon.

The shop, located in the former Pushcart Coffee space, is owned by Paul Kim and Ken Lo, who got their start two years ago at Artists & Fleas in Williamsburg. They went on to make the rounds at several other New York City markets (including the Hester Street Fair) and won a Vendy Award for best dessert last year.

We stopped by the store yesterday to try out some of the inventive and playful flavors and talk with the owners about the new brick-and-mortar location. Kim and Lo, who grew up in California, always wanted to bring West Coast-style creative ice cream to New York. The idea behind Ice & Vice is to push the limits of what ice cream can be, experimenting with different flavor combinations and sourcing unusual ingredients from all over the world. “This is not your normal ice cream,” said Lo. “This is our perspective on what ice cream should be.”

There will usually be a dozen flavors, six of them signature varieties, with the rest rotating. Have a look at the debut menu:

Milk Money: Toasted milk, sea salt dark chocolate ganache
Basic B: Mexican vanilla, black lava sea salt
Movie Night: Buttered popcorn, toasted raisin, dark chocolate flakes
Tea Dance: Nilgiri black tea leaf, lemon charcoal caramel
Nuts of Wrath: Marcona almond, grape Koolaid jam
9AM: Donut truffle blended with Vietnamese coffee
Three Little Pigs: Salted caramel with bacon butter and bacon praline
American Beauty: Crème fraiche mixed with rose petal jam
Shade: Smoked dark chocolate, caramelized white chocolate ganache
Happy Panda: Black rice horchata, coconut cream, Saigon cinnamon (sorbet)
Mahjong: Jasmine tea leaf, white peach, peach lambic (sorbet)

A single scoop will run you $4 and change, putting it in the same price stratosphere as Morgenstern’s on Rivington Street and a bit more expensive than Il Laboratorio Del Gelato, the veteran on the Lower East Side artisanal ice cream scene.

The East Broadway location is a retail shop but it’s also a production facility. A pristine room in the back of the store is a dairy plant, certified by the state Department of Agriculture. It includes a pasteurizer, giving Ice & Vice the ability to form the base for their products. “It allows us to control every single element that goes into our ice cream,” Lo said.

The shop will be open during the week until 10 p.m., later on weekends. In the months ahead, they’ll be adding new menu items, including sundaes, ice cream sandwiches and even coffee when fall rolls around.