NEW YORK—Brian Smith had three dreams as a young boy: to make movies, to make old-time radio shows, and to make ice cream.
After a career doing the first two items on that list, about six months ago, he made an attempt to conquer his third dream and opened his own artisanal ice cream shop in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, Ample Hills Creamery.
It was a raging success, exceeding Smith’s own expectations.Even late at night, people gather to try bold flavors, like salted caramel or the spicy Mexican hot chocolate.
All ingredients are made on the premises, visible to the delighted costumer. Smith is not only the owner; he still makes all the ice cream in the shop, putting his knowledge and enthusiasm in it.
The Epoch Times: How did your friends and family react when you told them you decided to open an ice cream shop?
Brian Smith: A lot of them were excited because they had my ice cream and they were confident it would go over well. Some were scared. It is not cheap to open a brick and mortar shop of any kind, let alone an ice cream shop, where you make everything on the premises.
We have to have a lot of equipment another ice cream shop might not have. I think people were a bit scared for me. We do have a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old. It was important to ease their concerns with my false confidence.
The Epoch Times: Following your success, are you looking to expand?
Smith: We are looking for the right avenue, weather to create a second shop, or packaging pints and selling them to retail stores. Both are very much on the table.
The trick is that in order to replicate this experience, it seems critical to me to replicate the making of the ice cream [on premises].
If we open another Ample Hills in SoHo and we made the ice cream in Brooklyn and shipped it to SoHo, you lose the critical component that makes this place unique: the connection to the process that gives birth to the ice cream.
You lose that authenticity. It is an expensive proposition. If there is a second Ample Hill shop they will have different flavors, because they will be making their own ice cream.
They will have their own set of things that are unique. We are looking at that, but now we are just trying to hold by our fingernails the work that had come our way from having the success we had.
The Epoch Times: How do you create a new flavor for ice cream?
Smith: It is a lot like screen writing. A lot of time I would be asked how I came up with a monster for a movie. It is a lot of stealing from other movies, a lot of research, and reading about mythical creatures.
You borrow a little bit here and a little bit there and you come up with something that is wholly yours, but is borrowed from a lot of other sources.
I am an ice cream fanatic. I still have pints of Ben and Jerry’s and Haagen-Dazs in my freezer.
I am always buying new things to see what other people are doing and I am always buying ice cream cookbooks and I will see something on the Internet … nothing comes out of a vacuum.
It all has to do with doing the legwork and doing the research, but also having the passion for it.
The Epoch Times: What would be your advice to New Yorkers, looking to create their own business?
Smith: I had zero business background as an artist, so I was not prepared in that sense.
My No. 1 [piece of] advice is that you have to do the legwork and do your research. You have to have passion for it. If it is just a desire to work for yourself, it will not be enough.
You need to have passion for what it is you are doing that would get you through the mundane tasks of regulation and accounting, legal stuff, or signing leases.
