July marks summer temperatures heating up, evening sunshine seemingly lasting forever, and lines at local ice cream shops stretching down the street. Among those shops is Morgenstern’s Finest in Manhattan, which debuted in 2014 after owner Nicholas Morgenstern traded his ice cream cart for an ice cream parlor.
Today, the shop is known for its rich small-batch flavors, ranging from vanilla, butterscotch, rockiest road, dulce de leche and strawberries and cream, to less expected offerings like avocado, tahini and jelly, and French fry.
Now, Morgenstern shares his recipes, tips and ice cream wisdom in the new “Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream” cookbook. He joins Here & Now‘s Robin Young to talk ice cream, which he says is “serious business.”
By Nicholas Morgenstern
People have been eating frozen water for dessert for hundreds of years. It’s like a trick; edible magic that never gets old. America’s love affair with ice cream goes all the way back to the founding fathers. At my Manhattan flagship store we make 88 flavors of ice cream in-house every day, digging deep into the history of ice cream to find the flavors of tomorrow.
I grew up in San Francisco, raised by a single mom and a down-and-out deadbeat dad. They divorced when I was young and we struggled with just about everything, including putting food on the table. Most of my upbringing found my brother and I staring down plates of my mother’s version of healthy; disgusting options such as raw zucchini salads and steamed chicken.
During the summer of 1983, when I was five and my brother was four, our parents put us on a plane to Columbus, OH, where my grandparents lived. They picked us up and we drove three hours south to Marietta, OH, on the bank of the Ohio River. Over the next five summers or so, the same routine ensued. We stayed a month at a time. We’d never been outside of the hippie commune that was San Francisco, where we ate kale and steamed tofu and absolutely no sugar. But back in Marietta, Grandpa Morgenstern ate real food. He survived losing his father at 12 during the Great Depression and that loss and leanness shaped his identity and his attitude about food—EATING IS SERIOUS BUSINESS. I can still hear him saying it, and I still believe it’s true. Grandpa Morgenstern served in the Army during World War II, and afterward put himself through school on the GI Bill while working at Broughton’s Dairy, where he fell in love with ice cream. Meals with my grandparents were simple but formidable: pork chops, lima beans, and corn; chicken fried steak with tomatoes; burgers (he loved hamburgers!). Appetizers were saltines with butter, a treat I indulge in to this day. But most exciting was this absolute: there was always dessert, and it was always ice cream. My grandfather loved ice cream—butter pecan most of all—and always had three or four flavors on hand. He had ice cream with every meal and so did we. Having ice cream everyday was a reminder that both he and America had made it through something tough, and this was their reward.
I started cooking professionally right out of high school, and immediately gravitated to the intoxi-cating world of fine dining. I spent years grinding my way up the ranks, as pastry chef of Gramercy Tavern Restaurant—a temple of American dining in New York. I knew nothing other than the twisted psychosis of cooking in this world, and I loved it. But I had reached a ceiling and just as I crested that pinnacle, I realized it was not going to be enough for me. I needed more space to grow, find new challenges, and create my own path.
So I quit my job and squinted into the light of a new reality. I’d been making ice cream for years at this point, ever since I unpacked the first ice cream machine at the Francis Drake Hotel in San Fran-cisco, when I was 18 or 19. Ice cream had been a constant in my life. But when I looked around at
the ice cream shops in New York at the time, I felt offended. Offended that something so good was being made so badly.
My savings were minimal, so I had to keep working. I spent the next couple years consulting, helping friends open restaurants, and figuring out what to do next. In 2008, I met a guy who owned a building with a restaurant space in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn. We were an odd pairing; he was an aging banker who owned real estate and clubs; I was an ex–pastry chef looking for a new path and opportunity. He want-ed an operations guy, general manager, and chef who would allow him to collect a profit and enjoy a mojito at the bar every night. Being a partner would be my reward.
I chewed on it and finally decided to go with my gut, trusting my work ethic would carry me. We opened an all-day café in the summer of 2008, just as the Great Recession was tearing New York’s dining world apart. As the markets crumbled, fine dining was spinning out, and casual dining was in.
At the end of the summer, I asked my business partner (and landlord) if I could sublease a small room in the basement, about 100 square feet. It had a dirt floor and was primarily used as a dumping spot for unused restaurant crap. He laughed when I told him I wanted to make ice cream there. He laughed again when I told him I wanted to put an ice cream cart in front of the restaurant, but he drew up a lease and let me do it. I used my savings to purchase an ice cream machine on eBay for $9,000, pour a foundation, and tile the room.
As winter ended, the business settled in. I had a little time to work on the ice cream cart. I knew Workman Cycles, just across the bridge in Queens, made beautiful push carts but none of them were what I wanted; I needed something unique and functional. I’d just purchased a ’73 Datsun 620 pickup that put me in the mood for mechanics, so I sketched out a design and gave myself a week to find the parts and put it together.
On the first spring day, we rolled out the cart. There was still a slight chill in the air; some of the staff wore sweatshirts. The sun came out, and when I opened the yellow and white umbrella, everything felt right. From that first chilly day, people were lined up for our ice cream, and soon other people were opening ice cream carts of their own. We made all the product five feet from the cart; Vietnamese Coffee, Burnt Honey Vanilla, Green Tea Pistachio. But the standout was Salted Caramel Pretzel.
From that little cart, I went on to open stores in Manhattan, serving hundreds of thousands of scoops of ice cream each year. We serve flavors that are a little different than you can find elsewhere. Our store has a distinct aesthetic: black and white, old school, to contrast with our very modern flavors—to keep the creativity in the cup and on the cone.
Ice cream is, after all, serious business. RIP Grandpa Morgenstern.
French Vanilla ice cream
Rockiest Road ice cream
Avocado ice cream
From “Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream” © 2025 by Nicholas Morgenstern. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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