The owners of iScream!, Tara’s and The Latest Scoop talk about how and why they got into dishing up dessert.
August 29, 2024
BERKELEYSIDE — There’s something about the mix of ice, milk, cream, sugar and flavorings that evokes old memories and especially strong emotions.
“Getting ice cream is one of my very first memories,” said Robin Devany, owner of the 14-year-old scoop shop iScream! (1819 Solano Ave.). “My grandfather would give me a handful of nickels to get me and my friends a scoop of ice cream.
“And yes, in those days you could get a scoop of ice cream for a nickel.”
Tara Esperanza, owner of Tara’s Organic Ice Cream (3173 College Ave.) had perhaps the most idyllic introduction. “I grew up in Massachusetts and there was a summer farm stand that served freshly made ice cream nearby. It was extraordinary, really. The cows were right there.”
Rick Blakeney owns The Latest Scoop, which produces artisanal gelato for restaurants and grocery stores, including Kirala, 900 Grayson and Berkeley Bowl. When Blakeney was a kid he never had hand-churned, farm-fresh, artisanal ice cream — and couldn’t have cared less.
“Jumping on the bike with my dad and my sister and going for Jamoca almond fudge seemed really cool and exciting. You could never have told me Jamoca almond fudge wasn’t the best.”
At no time during their formative years, however, did any of them think of ice cream as a professional calling. Devany was a career art teacher at Richmond High School. “Teaching was my life’s work,” she said. Esperanza has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts and continues to paint and exhibit locally. Blakeney had a long career in tech —“we’re talking pre-Mac days” — and really hadn’t ventured beyond Jamoca almond fudge.
But in the late 2000s, Devany began to notice a gaping hole in Berkeley’s culinary landscape. Ice cream stores, even the chains, had vanished. “There really was nothing in Berkeley at that time. There was Ici over on College, but then that closed. And there was a frozen yogurt shop. But every ice cream place in our neighborhood had turned into a coffee shop.”
Devany also had two teenagers at home who were itching to work. An ice cream store seemed like the ideal training ground. “It just made sense. They wanted jobs in the neighborhood; I wanted community; and we all loved ice cream.” She opened the upper Solano Avenue shop in 2010 and recently added a location on Fourth Street, next to the Oceanview Diner.
Esperanza wanted to get people away from ultra-processed ice cream pumped up with dyes, fillers, preservatives, gums and artificial ingredients. “Ice cream doesn’t have to be junk food,” she said. “Ice cream can be organic and wholesome, sweetened with spices and fruit. A customer said our ice cream is what they would have had in ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ ” Tara’s prides itself on being both state-certified Organic and Green. Located on College near Alcatraz, it’s part of the newly expanded Elmwood District.
But if the taste of Esperanza’s ice cream is “Little House,” the look is art museum. Although the canvas is small and slippery, Esperanza mixes her flavors with an eye toward “composition and color,” trains her staff to balance the light-colored flavors with deeply hued ones in the display case and decorates her cakes with handmade paper flowers. “I just transferred my artistic side to the culinary world,” she said.
Does it pain her that her art gets masticated to a slush in minutes? “I love it,” she said.
Blakeney wasn’t so much looking to get into ice cream as he was taking a break from tech during the dotcom bust. “I was looking for a business to buy when I heard about The Latest Scoop — it found me,” he said. The Latest Scoop is not an ice cream shop, but a manufacturer in West Berkeley. The numbers looked good: it had been operating in Berkeley since 1979, had a healthy roster of established customers, and Berkeley’s artisanal food scene was flourishing. The people wanted ice cream and gelato, as well as vegan ice cream and authentic Italian sorbetto.
But it was neither The Latest Scoop’s durability nor changing food trends that sold him on the purchase. It was the vanilla gelato. “In all honesty I wasn’t even knowledgeable about gelato,” he said. “Vanilla for me was just white ice cream. The minute I sampled the vanilla, I realized I’d never even had real vanilla.”
He bought the business in 2001 and now has a recipe list numbering in the hundreds and keeps 75 flavors on hand. Berkeley Bowl sells seven flavors on rotation: Vanilla Bean, Dark Chocolate, Ginger Pear Sorbet, Honey Lavender, Lychee, Passion Fruit Guava and Vanilla Coconut Cream.
Decades of churning and scooping later, they each got what they were looking for. Devany got her sense of community. Esperanza found a way to meld her artistry with her environmental ethos. Blakeney got into a business whose end product delights people rather than frustrates or bores them. “I never got thank you notes when I was working in computers,” he said.
“The whole reason we started this business was community,” Devany said. “And it’s the whole reason we continue. People ride their bikes here, people walk here. Some families come every Friday, rain or shine. Some people tell us, ‘You are a line item in our budget.’ ”
“Whether they are having a good day or a bad day, ice cream just makes people feel great,” Esperanza said. “It’s such a personal business. I have a family that has been coming here since I started, and when their kid was in fourth grade he did a report on his favorite food: my basil ice cream.”
Kelcey Blakeney, Rick Blakeney’s niece and general manager of The Latest Scoop, does lament that their gelato business doesn’t have that real-time view of customers’ moments of bliss. Not that she doesn’t have a sneaky workaround. “If I’m in a restaurant and someone orders our spumoni, I always have to watch them eat it. And sometimes when I’m in a grocery store and someone is buying our gelato, I want to shout, ‘That’s our gelato! We made that!’”
WHAT NEXT
- Attend an upcoming event on Fourth Street or Solano Ave and amplify the fun with a stop at iScream! Buy a cone from Tara’s while in The Elmwood. (Mention this article or the #DiscoveredinBerkeley campaign at any of the three shops and get at 15% discount through October.)
- Pick up a pint of Tara’s or The Latest Scoop from Berkeley Bowl or ask your favorite restaurant to carry these brands.
- Visit the Discovered in Berkeley Stories page to find more articles about innovative local businesses.
