Set aside the oaks, the Stanley Cup, and even the Tobacco Road basketball lore. Raleigh is an ice cream town, a cow-to-cone city in a frozen melting pot of a region churning with flavors from Greece, Thailand, Mexico, Japan—and, of course, North Carolina farms.
The city’s appetite for ice cream has deep roots. In the 1880s, shop proprietor Antonio Dughi, who ran a farm south of town, sold ice cream out of his Fayetteville Street shop and sent his horse-drawn ice cream cart to Peace College to satisfy student demand. A century later, in 1988, Raleigh became the birthplace of Harry Brathwaite’s Goodberry’s Frozen Custard, a venture launched with a boost from North Carolina State University’s dairy experts.
Today, Raleigh is home to ice cream royalty, with spots like Andia’s Ice Cream and Two Roosters on USA Today’s lists of America’s best ice cream shops. Andia’s operates shops in Raleigh, Cary, and Durham, and owner Andia Xouris is a James Beard Fellow and a two-time Grand Master Ice Cream Maker, a title the North American Ice Cream Association awards to a handful of chefs who have earned multiple blue ribbons over a period of years.
“Andia is genius at flavors,” said Laura Clemons, the business’s director of operations. French vanilla, double dark chocolate, and mango jalapeño margarita are among Xouris’s prize-winning concoctions. “
Two Roosters Ice Cream owner Jared Plummer, an N.C. State accounting graduate, operates shops in Raleigh, Cary, Durham, and Wake Forest. The business is often known to create novelty flavors, as in April, when Plummer launched a flavor collection created by Carolina Hurricanes players.
more on andia’s ice cream
Last summer, as part of a podcaster series, Two Roosters created a flavor to celebrate local sports podcast Ovies and Giglio. Cohost Joe Giglio wanted an ice cream that tastes like “the best Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup you could ever imagine,” and said Plummer nailed it.
“I like to call Jared a magician. I don’t know how he gets the ice cream to hold all the flavor, but he does,” Giglio said, adding that tasting Two Roosters ice cream has a Proustian effect, transporting “you to where you were when you had that flavor for the first time.”
Cow to Cone
At Howling Cow Dairy Education Center and Creamery off Lake Wheeler Road, just six miles from the city’s venue for opera and high art, you can wave at the cows that produced the milk that N.C. State students used to make your ice cream.
The creamery is across the pasture from N.C. State’s 389-acre dairy farm, where the daily milking of more than 300 cows begins the day’s production. Through underground lines, the milk travels from udders to a way station that gathers data on every offering from every cow.
From there, lines carry the milk to a reservoir and then through a filtration system and on to cooling vessels. Once chilled, the milk rests in bulk tanks until an N.C. State dairy plant milk truck transports it—2,400 gallons at a time—to Schaub Hall on Dan Allen Drive. Right there on campus, the processing facility pasteurizes and homogenizes the milk, churning out skim, low-fat, and whole milk, as well as heavy cream and a “flavorless base mix” that is stored in a silo until it’s blended with flavors to make ice cream.
“Like chili, it’s better the next day,” said Carl Hollifield, director of N.C. State’s Dairy Enterprise System.
From Schaub Hall, ice cream delivery trucks typically make two runs a week to Howling Cow. During the summer, Creamery Supervisor Taylor Nail adds a third delivery to meet demand.
In the best sense, the farm and creamery make Raleigh a cow town. Relentless development has cost Wake County more than 30,000 acres of farmland in the last two decades. Yet Howling Cow persists, and customer affection is growing.
“For many families in Raleigh and the surrounding areas, this may be one of the few opportunities they have to experience a working dairy farm and see large farm animals up close,” said Nail. “That connection between agriculture, education, and community is a huge part of what makes Howling Cow special.”
On sunny weekends, the wait for Howling Cow ice cream can reach 45 minutes—or longer. Still, Nail receives positive customer feedback. Folks admire how N.C. State students, who staff the operation, keep it all moving. Guests gravitate to the rocking chairs on the porch, and kids find free-range moments in the meadow and climb the fence to get a better look at the cows.
This spring, for the first time, Nail invited staff to come up with new flavors. From 30 submissions, she settled on six finalists that will make it to the test kitchen. If a flavor works great in production, she’ll take it to Palm Springs in November for Conecon, the North American Ice Cream Association’s annual gathering.
If the flavor shows well there, there’s a good chance she’ll add it to the freezer case at Howling Cow, where Wolf Tracks, a vanilla ice cream loaded up with fudge swirl and mini peanut butter cups, is consistently a top seller.
The Good Life: An Ice Cream Manifesto
Across Wake County’s 857 square miles, from McLean Farms in Fuquay-Varina to Lumpy’s in Wake Forest, from Daughter’s Soft Serve in Wendell to Mama Bird’s in Apex, more than 120 parlors, walk-up windows, dine-in joints, and specialty shops feature ice cream.
The geographic distribution matters. Widespread availability is a good thing. Ice cream is an analog amenity that fosters human connection. People leave their houses for ice cream. They meet up and congregate in public spaces. Ice cream represents a victory for Epicureanism’s good life over Stoicism’s indifference to pleasure.
“They say that ice cream has a very special ability to evoke memories and nostalgia because you take a bite and you lick the ice cream and the flavor is released as the butterfat melts in your tongue. It’s a very nostalgic experience,” said Maura McCarthy, founder and owner of Raleigh’s Bold Batch creamery. “For me, I had to have ice cream every single night before I started making it myself.”
Going out for ice cream builds more than social capital. U.S. cities are competing on indicators of connectivity, and ice cream—along with coffee, art, and cocktails—is a magnet that pulls people into parks, galleries, and other shared spaces.
Currently, 41 percent of Raleigh residents live within a half-mile walk to a park. Raleigh leaders are working to move up the rankings, and food and beverage are playing a central role in the city’s Greenway System and in new amenities such as Gipson Play Plaza, Flowers Cottage, Thomas Dambo’s trolls, and House of Many Porches Market.
For cyclists, the city has mapped a 12-mile Howling Cow Ice Cream Run, and the city is expanding its Greenway Food Vendor program to embed more culinary treats into parks. Andia’s Iron Works location is on the greenway, alongside Crabtree Creek Trail, and ice cream lovers can knit together a greenway route from Andia’s to Two Roosters location on Lead Mine Road, which sits near Mine Creek Trail.
Frozen Melting Pot
Chef Andrew Zimmern, a restaurateur and TV personality, recently described the Triangle, in an Instagram video, as a place where “serious chefs are doing thoughtful, ingredient-driven work” and “where global flavors and Southern roots actually mean something on the plate.”
This is particularly true in Cary, where seekers can find an ice cream trail of global flavors. Start at the Two Roosters location at Waverly Place with scoops of coffee, bourbon, and blackberry hibiscus ice cream. Head north on Kildaire Farm Road—St. Brigid of Kildare is the patron saint of dairy farmers, among other things—to find Goodberry’s Sir Walter Wally, which blends vanilla custard, strawberries, chocolate chips, and wet walnuts.
A block away at Sugar Koi, Nat Jirasawad, a former sushi chef who grew up in Thailand, has mastered his mother’s homemade coconut ice cream recipe.
A decade ago, Jirasawad began teaching himself to make ice cream from scratch, discovering along the way that the ice cream he was producing was Philadelphia style, which is 16 percent butterfat—two or three times the butterfat of gelato. Now he creates original flavors using Asian teas and fruits and local produce: “Simple and honest ingredients,” Jirasawad said.
Ube is Jirasawad’s most popular original flavor, and he sources the yams from farmers in Garner and Hillsborough. Jirasawad is precise with his produce: He differentiates Alphonso mangoes from Champagne mangoes in his mango recipes, stating, “Each one has a purpose.”
He spent two years working on a recipe for genmaicha tea ice cream. “It came to me in a dream. Now I have the perfect genmaicha ice cream,” he said. He keeps ube ice cream in the freezer case year-round and rotates black sesame, honeydew, oolong tea, and other flavors.
Heading east from Sugar Koi, the Andia’s southeast Cary location is minutes away. A Cyprus native with Greek heritage, Xouris makes a baklava ice cream that somehow tastes more like baklava than the dessert itself. As a reminder of the expanse of the ice cream universe, Dairy Queen is next door to Andia’s.
To the north, on East Chatham Street, Eric and Carlos Torres’ Vida Dulce ice cream shop features many flavors that originated from the family’s ice cream parlor in Guadalajara, Mexico. The cousins offer a churro split and Mexican ice cream flavors such as Gansito, piñon, and zarzamora con queso.
Across the Triangle, in Garner, married duo Burton Buffaloe and Dustin Smith have turned their family farm, Holl & Stone, into a produce market, nursery, and leisure destination.
Their New Zealand-style ice cream, a honeymoon discovery, uses an auger to blend hard-packed ice cream with fruit and herbs from the farm. The result is a product with the swirly look of American soft serve but not the consistency—it’s firmer, less sugary, and “really fruit forward,” said Smith, who said he wanted “to incorporate a piece of the farm.”
Smith makes blueberry basil ice cream, and he created a mint chocolate chip ice cream by blending fresh mint with vanilla ice cream and then adding a chocolate chip topping. To the dismay of some customers, the ice cream was white, not Day-Glo green, and it tasted like fresh mint from the garden, not like mint candy.
“People loved it or hated it,” Smith said. “People were not used to what mint tastes like.” For the summer, he is blending dried fig leaves—which taste like coconut—and pineapple into a vanilla base to make piña colada ice cream.
The Ice Cream Lady
Bold Batch Creamery’s Maura McCarthy is Raleigh’s ice cream mad scientist. Without a retail store, she brings her ice cream to pop-up events, festivals, and all sorts of venues. She also runs a subscription program, Flight Club, that delivers four original flavors the last week of each month, does a little catering, and occasionally takes commissions to produce bespoke flavors. Sugar Euphoria on North Person Street sells her ice cream in pints and in one- and two-scoop containers.
“I make ice cream,” said McCarthy. “I’m an ice cream lady.”
McCarthy has an aversion to mass production and no tolerance for “boring ice cream.” She’s learning to calibrate for seasonal peaks and valleys. (“The winter is what breaks you,” she said.)
In her recipes, she’s as likely to use salt as sugar. When the ice cream calls for a cookie or brownie, she wants home-baked items. She uses dairy from Homeland Creamery, local strawberries, and pears from a neighbor’s tree. The small-scale production equipment gives her exacting control of ingredients.
Some of her flavors are elegant. Her hōjicha black sesame ice cream is a “silky custard made with roasted green tea, swirled with a black sesame caramel,” per the carton description. It’s elegant enough to pass for a blancmange and deserves a chilled silver spoon. She also makes The Munchies, a “brown butter chocolate chunk cookie-infused ice cream packed full of cookies and milk chocolate toffee made with Cheez-Its, Ruffles, M&M’s, and pretzels.” It’s a 420 binge to eat with a shovel.
“I have to have a balance between the trashy and nostalgic flavors and the flavors that get people to try something new,” McCarthy said.
Her spiced honey cream cheese ice cream works as a bagel spread. She grinds up pink peppercorns to make her strawberry ice cream pop. Her White Monster sorbet carries an energy-drink jolt. Using sourdough waffle cone batter—a Boulted Bread influence—McCarthy makes ice cream tacos loaded with toppings. “They’re very elaborate. It’s like a walking sundae,” she said.
A military brat, McCarthy grew up living all over the United States and in Japan, where she returned to live, for a while, after attending college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her second tour, she lived on Shikoku, one of a series of islands that feature local food and culture at michi-no-eki, or roadside stations.
“They have all the local goods for that specific town that you’re visiting,” McCarthy said. “There are bridges connecting each island. You can bike the whole thing. It’s beautiful, some of the most picturesque views. Then you stop at all the michi-no-eki, and you get a different flavor of soft serve at each island. All of my pictures of myself in Japan, I’m holding an ice cream cone.”
The possibility for a local adaptation of michi-no-eki is compelling. Across the Triangle, neighborhoods could promote their own cultural and culinary specialties, with each neighborhood showcasing a favorite ice cream.
After all, some neighborhoods give off Munchies vibes, and some are more blueberry lemon sorbet. From Heather Hills in Garner to Gimghoul Road in Chapel Hill, from Hayti in Durham to Hayes Barton in Raleigh, our Triangle Tour de Ice Cream can outdo Boston’s Freedom Trail and Nashville’s Pub Crawl. The timing is ideal, now that a public-health expert has blown the lid off a conspiracy to suppress research showing ice cream’s positive health effects.
For the Triangle Tour de Ice Cream, we can draw on the words Texas Rep. Kika de la Garza uttered in 1984 to celebrate the passage of his National Ice Cream Day resolution: “If you feel defeated or frustrated, eat ice cream. If you’re happy and want to celebrate, eat ice cream. Ice cream is good for you.” Let the scooping begin.
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