The Ample Hills Founders Make Their Comeback This Weekend With a New Ice Cream Shop

The Ample Hills founders return to Prospect Heights

Roughly a year after founders Jackie Cuscuna and Brian Smith bowed out of Brooklyn-based ice cream company Ample Hills, the duo will return with a new ice cream and doughnut shop this weekend. The Social, located in the same neighborhood as the first Ample Hills scoop shop, is set to open at 816 Washington Avenue, at Saint Johns Place, on July 25, according to Cuscuna.

Whimsical ice cream flavors — like the new Bubble Mallow (a bubble gum-flavor with marshmallows) — that made Ample Hills a hit will still be featured on the menu at the Social. The location will also apparently double as a doughnut shop, joining Brooklyn’s growing number of bakeries devoted to the treats.

When it debuted in 2011, Ample Hills Creamery was an overnight success and within a decade, Cuscuna and Smith oversaw nearly a dozen locations of the scoop shop known for its over-the-top flavors like Ooey Gooey Butter Cake (which Oprah Winfrey loved). It all came crashing down as the couple declared bankruptcy in March 2020 just a day before NYC shut down indoor dining. In the latest episode of the couple’s podcast, As the Ice Cream Churns, Cuscuna said the duo have learned lessons from their experience operating Ample Hills: “We’re ready to start over.”

In other news

— Elected officials and local organizations are speaking out against reports that the New York Police Department shut down unlicensed street vendors in the Bronx earlier this week. “You cannot continue a vending system that is inherently inequitable and then rain down police to enforce it,” according to a letter co-signed by more than 20 elected officials.

— A last-minute addition to Eater’s guide for homesick Texans: Border Town, a pop-up taqueria, is serving thin Sonoran-style flour tortillas made with pork lard from East Williamsburg bar Pink Metal on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

— Strong Roots is getting into the restaurant game, according to Quartz. The frozen food company is now slinging hash browns and breakfast sandwiches from a ghost kitchen at the Hudson Hound bar in the West Village.

— Kissaki, the rapidly expanding chain of sushi restaurants, is behind a new omakase counter atop the Gansevoort Meatpacking hotel. The pop-up, called Saishin at the Gansevoort Rooftop, runs from July to January 2022.

— “Put people over cars on our streets,” Janette Sadik-Khan, NYC’s former Department of Transportation commissioner argues in the New York Daily News.

— Local restaurateurs react to President Joe Biden’s suggestion that restaurants should increase worker wages to hire back employees.

— Sorry Virgos: