450: We All Scream For Durian Vanilla Ice Cream with Nicholas Morgenstern

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. I'm really interested and curious about ice cream. So if I go somewhere and I see something interesting, I want to check it out and try it. As just a day-to-day consumer, I'm not eating ice cream every day. People think that that's what I should be doing. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbinell.

0:59Nicholas Morgenstern is the owner and operator of Morgenstern's Finest Ice Cream, a beloved small-batch ice cream parlor in New York City with nationwide delivery. After a decade of operations in the city, he stopped by the show to talk about how the cult-followed ice cream gets made and how he thinks ice cream tastes have shifted over the past few years.

1:27Nicholas Morgenstern, this is Taste. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. You know, I have to tell you, when I first moved to New York, I lived walking distance from the Morgensterns on Rivington, and it was part of my neighborhood weekend loop that I would do. So I'm really happy to have you on the show. Great to be here. And I hear that a lot. Yeah. People tell me that about that store a lot. I mean, it's kind of like in such a good nexus point of the Lower East Side, like meeting Bowery almost. What would you call that neighborhood, Lower East Side? I kind of think it's more like no lead to no ho.

2:01It's not even either of those, but it feels closer to those. It's funny you say that when I when I signed the lease for that store, I had been looking for a store for over a year and just trying to push as far west as I could that I could afford. And that location popped up and it was formerly a restaurant supply store. And the landlord had like recently split it into three stores. And I had bought equipment in that restaurant supply store, you know, working in the industry before. and it was a strange experience because I had looked at all these stores and I had really been rebuffed by most landlords that I spoke with and I sat on the bench in front of Lee Can Designs which is a store that sells kind of like antiques from Asia and Southeast Asia and I sat on their bench and I was with someone who I worked with and I just was like this is it and I hadn't even talked to anyone I like called the number on the door and I just had this like pretty strong feeling And I had a strong feeling about that street.

3:02Rivington is a special street. I now know it's a thoroughfare. It has a ton of bicycle traffic and foot traffic that's basically moving between those two neighborhoods. So while it looks kind of like a sleepy side street, it's really busy. And I think the landscape of streets in New York is like so specific street to street. So if you go one block north to Stanton in the same location, it's like you're not going to do any business over there. And if you went one block south, you'd be on Delancey, which I've watched like so many places open and close. And so that location has just been really special for us and has worked.

3:37And I'm really lucky that I have a great landlord there as well who's worked with me through even like through the pandemic when it was really rough. Yeah, I love hearing about the geography of places in New York. I lived between Rivington and Delancey. So I think those streets to me are so different in terms of the experience of walking down them. Like you would never really want to stroll down Delancey. But Rivington, you definitely do want to stroll down like with an ice cream in hand. And it makes so much sense. And when you're talking about signing the lease, how many years ago was that? I signed the lease in 2013.

4:08Right. So this is like 10 year, 11 year. We're in our tenure right now because I leased the store in the summer of 13 and I opened it in the spring of 14. So this is our tenure this year. I love getting to talk to you on the decade anniversary. And I have a lot of questions just about how you've seen things shifting and evolving and staying the same over the years. But to start, I'm wondering if you could just tell me a little bit about your career, your past as a pastry chef before you were this kind of ice cream tycoon here in New York. What inspired you to want to get into ice cream in that way in the first place?

4:39Okay. I don't think of myself as a tycoon. Tycoon in like heavy air quotes. Well, yeah. I am like an ice cream operator because I make ice cream, but I'm also like operating these stores. I worked as a cook, as a pastry cook for a long time, mostly in fine dining restaurants in California where I'm from and Hawaii. I worked in Europe and then I moved to New York in 2001 and I cooked in a number of big fine dining restaurants here. And then I got out of the out of the I guess like the fine dining world and I opened a small neighborhood restaurant in Fort Greene in 2008. and then I put an ice cream cart in front of the restaurant, which was always, for a very long time, I had thought that I should do that at other restaurants where I was working as the pastry chef.

5:35And I was told to go away or not mention that, or they just weren't interested in it. And for whatever reason, they just didn't see that that was a good idea. And so I finally did it at my restaurant in Fort Greene in 2009. mine. And then the ice cream cart was very successful. The restaurant was successful. The ice cream cart was very successful. And that opened my eyes to possibly being able to make a business out of selling ice cream exclusively. And then I opened another restaurant in the East Village after that. And then and I was trying to get a lease for an ice cream store. But, you know, So back then, sort of pre-social media, and I feel like a lot of things have changed in New York since then.

6:19The iPhone changed New York a lot, in my opinion. It was just like looking at Craigslist and like trying to like basically go on foot and look for spaces. So I spent a long time looking for an ice cream store and couldn't find something or couldn't get a landlord to let me do it. So I spent a number of years trying to get to the point that I could have an ice cream shop. And then, as I mentioned earlier, finally in 2013, found a landlord that was willing to give me a chance. Usually I was kind of, I wasn't being taken seriously. They were like, I guess this guy wants to make ice cream. So that I just was like really focused and driven to do that.

6:56So when we opened Rivington 10 years ago, it was a terrific feeling to have it be successful. It was successful from the very first time that I unlocked the door to the public. There was a line around the block from the very beginning. So I love hearing about the ice cream cart origin because I feel like fast forward 10 years later, that's such a huge business for a lot of restaurants in the city and certainly in Fort Greene, which is the neighborhood that I live in. I feel like there's every time I walk around, there's like a new ice cream cart out in front. Do you feel like that also is kind of a more recent trend that's kind of picked up speed?

7:30It didn't exist before I did it. And then a lot of places followed suit and did it quickly behind me. I think they saw that there was a lot of attention. We got write-ups for it and so on. And if you have the location and you can figure out how to make it work, it can be an amenity. I've seen places do it and not work as well. So it can go both ways. But yeah, I started with an ice cream cart. I still use ice cream carts. It's a huge part of our business for our events business. And last year we did a partnership with Ernesto's and we put an ice cream cart in front of their store, which was very nostalgic and reminiscent for me.

8:08Like and I that was a full on partnership. Yes, it was a collaboration between the chef Ryan and I to make the flavors and everything. But it was a partnership as far as like how we worked together to develop the concept and to deal with all of the operational details. And I was like right back to my playbook that was like 10 years old at that point and going like, no, this is the way that you operate this thing. Rolling the cart in and out of the store and plugging it in and how much staff and all that kind of stuff, because I had done that before. Yeah, all of those logistics. And you say that you opened the store and from the jump you had a lion around the block.

8:39How did you get that kind of support shored up from the beginning? Robin Robin from New York Magazine. They were always supportive in my career and supportive of so many young chefs who really got their start in New York, just like being scrappy and like aggressive with their perspective on food. And Robin Robin at the time, they were really on the pulse of that. And they would, I think when they saw something that they thought was good or was going to be good, they would really push it in the magazine, in New York Magazine. And so before we opened the store, there was a two page spread of our King Kong banana split.

9:21And they highlighted the fact that we had five vanillas on the menu, which we still do have a number of vanillas and chocolates and so on. That's like the way that we do the menu. And so they highlighted that. And it was this two page spread picture of this banana split. it. And I think that, I mean, I didn't ask the people in line, but I can only assume, as I said, it was really the early days of social media driving business through the doors of brick and mortar. So it wasn't like a quote unquote viral situation. And yeah, there was a line out the door from the moment. I was putting in all of the coat hooks under the counters at 445 and we were opening at five.

10:04And when I stood up, I looked outside and there was all these people standing out there. And I had been building the store for six or seven months. So I'd spent a lot of time in there and there was never like a crowd of people standing on Rivington. And I turned to my manager who had spent a lot of time working with me in restaurants. And I was like, what's what what all these people doing out there? And she very nervously was counting the till and she was like, I think they're here for us. And then we opened the door and it was like, yeah, crazy from there. I love hearing that. And I imagine someone listening might be wondering how you can have five different vanillas on a menu.

10:34Is that about the vanilla itself that you're sourcing or how did you kind of differentiate and what made you want to do five vanillas in the first place? So we only use vanilla from Madagascar. In my opinion, that's the vanilla that I prefer for the style of ice cream that we make. And the different types of vanilla on our menu will range. Right now we're serving vanilla with bourbon, with old granddad bourbon. We're serving vanilla with burnt honey. We serve vanilla with just plain Madagascar vanilla, like kind of classic or standard. We have a toasted rice and matcha vanilla on the menu right now.

11:14And then we have a vanilla flavor that's made with almond roca, the candies. And so we move things around. I think vanilla is like the most important palate in ice cream. It's like kind of like the standard. And so there's a lot of different ways that you can express something with it. So that's why we did that. The reason I did it is because I went to another ice cream shop in New York right before I opened it, maybe like a year, maybe less than a year before I opened it. And they had all kinds of like pretty provocative flavors on the menu. and at the top of the menu it said no we don't have vanilla and I remember like seeing that and I was like that's really a stupid thing to do that's what I thought to myself as a business I was like vanilla is like so critical and so important to people's experience of eating ice cream like as a chef if you're like bored by it or you don't like it or you know whatever that's like your personal feeling about it.

12:24But to the customer and their experience, that's critical. And my order, if I go to a store is vanilla on a cake cone. There's nothing that gives me the same like nostalgic feeling as having that. So if I went to a place, which I did, and they didn't have it, not only was I like disappointed that they didn't have the thing that I would want, but I was also like a little bit insulted as a customer. I felt like so. Yeah, it's funny because obviously to say something is vanilla is kind of colloquially a dig that it's boring or not quite good enough. But I do think you're right that even on a nostalgia perspective, which a lot of ice cream is driven by thoughts of nostalgia, it's kind of the core color in your palate to have.

13:05and hearing about this, I want to know about how you cycle in and out flavors. I feel like that must be a huge part about running production for an ice cream shop. How do you decide when you're going to move something out or bring something back in? Do you have like a big database somewhere of every flavor you've ever done? Yeah, I keep track of the flavors for sure. And then we change the menu once a year now. And I think it started in 2020 or 2021, maybe. so when we moved from Rivington to our big location on LaGuardia and Houston we the menu was 88 flavors there and that menu was meant to not change very much it was so many flavors I felt like we had really covered all the bases after during and after the pandemic We reduced it down to 55 and then started to look at changing the menu more regularly.

14:05So changing the menu in an ice cream store has its own challenges. Customers become attached to your flavors. And for a store like ours where we are probably the only place that you can get a lot of the things that we serve, people become really attached to it. And they not only want to have that experience themselves, but they also want to bring other people to have that experience. So I've worked the register in my store a lot, and I've seen how deflating it can be for someone when they've brought someone and probably like someone visiting from out of town. And they said, oh, my God, we're going to go have this experience.

14:47And you've got to come and have they have salt and pepper, pine, or they have durian, banana or any of the then. And then they come and we don't have it. And it's like they're really, really, you know, crestfallen. So that I'm sensitive to that as the person writing the menu. On the other hand, over the years, I've seen how if we don't change the menu, then the new flavors don't come up for people to create a relationship with. So if the menu just stayed the same forever, then things become a little bit flat for the for the experience. And so it's really tough. A very popular flavor right now is made with salted egg yolk and pineapple.

15:28And for people who have spent time in Southeast Asia and Taiwan and Singapore, those flavors are like really connected. And for New York palate, probably unusual, even though you can find those things here. And when we first put that flavor on the menu, it was not popular. and within one or two months of it being on the menu, it was like rivaling the top selling flavors on the menu. So we had to move something out of the way to make room for that flavor. And if we hadn't, it wouldn't be there and we wouldn't know and nor would the guests. So long answer to your question is we change the menu once a year.

16:11The matrix of our menu is organized around the categories of flavor, vanilla, chocolate, caramel, coffee, and then some fruit flavors, peach and strawberry, raspberry, tropical flavors, and down the list. And we've changed those things. I've changed that stuff over the years. As we move into different territories, we kind of like push into classic American flavors and make a category for that. Or we have, now we have a category for cookies and then a miscellaneous category, which is as it should be just like super random weird stuff like mayonnaise and pickles or, you know, Takis flavor this year or something like that.

16:46So. Yeah, the Takis flavor I think is so fun. That's such a huge middle school memory probably for me. It's like buying Takis out of a kid's backpack and eating it. I've never had it in ice cream form, but I feel like it must be good. Why is it so good in ice cream form? um my my opinion spice and ice cream is tricky and there's a lot of acidity actually in takis there's a lot of different acids in there um it's really because of the corn the corn flavor actually makes it really yummy corn ice cream is one of my all-time favorite flavors of ice cream and i feel like it's something that has become slowly and slowly easier to find here in the city it must be interesting for you as an ice cream producer to see the way that like larger ice cream trends kind of take hold of people's imaginations.

17:33Yeah, the palate is expanded a lot and people are really interested in different things. My experience with that from the beginning has been that people want, they want to try new stuff. In New York City, I think you're here and you are exposed to so many things here in food and in all forms of like creative expression. So So we put durian on the menu when we opened the store. And durian is a fruit from Southeast Asia. It's called the king of fruits. It's a giant fruit. It's the size of a football. It has all these spikes all over it. What it's known for is its aroma, its smell, and its flavor, which can be really off-putting to some people.

18:20And it has a lot of volatile compounds similar to like fermented like beer or cheese. Papaya, I think, has a little bit of that kind of whiff as well. Definitely. That like kind of ammoniated aroma can be in there. But man, people who love durian, they love durian. And we put it on the menu the first from the beginning, the first day that we were open, which was the Friday of Memorial Day in 2014. and I made all the ice cream and I was working all the services and I had made a fair guesstimate of how much of each flavor I should make based on how popular I thought they would be. So I made a lot of salted caramel pretzel and bourbon vanilla and Vietnamese coffee and I didn't make so much durian banana.

19:05And back then I was buying all the durians fresh like on the street, which because I didn't have a vendor for those. So on Sunday afternoon, the team, we were super busy all weekend And the team came up to me on Sunday afternoon and said, we're out of durian banana. I said, no way, it's not possible. I made three gallons of that. We couldn't have gone through that much. And then ran around the store looking through the freezers. And sure enough, we didn't have any. And on Monday morning, which was Memorial Day, we couldn't get any more durian. Those guys weren't out selling on the street that day.

19:35And I couldn't have made it anyway because it needs 24 hours. So I worked the register all day on Memorial Day that year and was blown away by how many people came in expecting to have it and were very disappointed that we didn't have it. So word had traveled within three days that there was this place that had this thing. And so like not only interesting to see how quickly things traveled and people were like looking for that, but also that they wanted something that typically would have been like most chefs would have said, don't put that on the menu. That's like a gross ingredient. So I learned an important lesson there.

20:11Polarizing ingredients are really, really important to our matrix. Yeah, I love thinking about that. And also talking with you 10 years later, I think durian has become even more popular on a global scale. The New York Times just a couple weeks ago was writing about how the price of durian has gone up so dramatically because more and more people are craving it. Are there any other ingredients or flavors you've done on the menu that you've seen a big kind of increase or shift in interest over the past decade? I think all tropical fruits are going to continue to gain momentum. And we put a new flavor on the menu this year, which is mango and melon, which it's a sorbet.

20:49It's delicious. I love it. I just would not have thought that it would have been as popular as it is. I get all the flavor matrix sales every week, and it's consistently beating out almost any sorbet we've ever made. so mango is becoming incredibly popular anytime that we put mango on the menu very popular um the other side of the spectrum on that is that i think like maybe coming out of the pandemic and people looking for familiarity or like nostalgia um things that are foods that are familiar and i'm specifically driving at like cookies um that stuff has also been like really really popular Those things right now.

21:35I mean, we look at the data all the time and things move around, but things that were popular before, like salted caramel and like maybe things that were like kind of more chefy, those things were really popular, whereas it seems to be pivoting towards like ingredient oriented and or this like nostalgia vibe. Like, yeah, I think the common thread that I see between that is that ice cream is like the familiar vehicle for people. And then the expression of the flavor of the ingredient is maybe like the unexpected twist. So whether it's an ingredient that people are less familiar with or is a dessert that people are familiar with, but they haven't had it in ice cream form.

22:15There's that kind of combination of like nostalgia and then forward thinking at the same time. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, when I talk to people about putting together a menu and whether it's a menu in a restaurant or in my case, it's in an ice cream shop, you know, the customer can only order what's on the menu. They cannot order what's not on your menu. So sometimes I think looking at the sales matrix of like what's moving and what's not moving, it's all going to be relative to the available selection. So if you have cookies and cream on your menu and you don't have mint cookies and cream on your menu next to it, you don't know whether mint cookies and cream would be as popular, more popular, less popular.

23:01And if you put the two things next to each other, that's going to create its own dynamic versus having one or the other. And so we're fortunate that we have the experience of seeing what it looks like as we move things basically in and out of the slots. So the slots sort of sort of stay the same. So I have room for five vanillas, five chocolates, three coffees, three caramels and so on. and certain things don't change for us because we would really upset people if we take some certain flavors off the menu. There's like 12 flavors that really hard for us to take off the menu. And that's been consistent like since the ice cream cart, like since back then.

23:42And so those things kind of anchor, they give us like the base and then we move things in and out. And I'm never not surprised by what does really well and also what doesn't do really well. I would love to get my hands on the data of like the flavors that are performing week over week. It's so interesting to think about it in that kind of way. The other thing that's interesting about it is so I get a report every week for the previous seven days. And so it is interesting to look at it in like so I'm seeing it on a seven day report, but then looking at it rolling over a longer period, it always is.

24:17It's never the same. So what was popular for one week will not track what was popular for that same month necessarily. Wow. I wonder if you could cross-reference with weather patterns or festivals, events, like what is causing those week-over-week shifts is really interesting. Having been in the restaurant business for years, I think almost every chef would also tell you they're just like, I don't know what's going on. Why is the pork chop selling tonight? And it happens and it feels very strange when it's happening or like something's in the air because like it's summertime and like last Friday was hot.

24:54This Friday is hot. Next Friday is going to be hot. Like what are we pointing to that now all of a sudden there's a run on a particular protein as an example. I've experienced that a lot in restaurants where you're just like scratching your head. We didn't order enough of something and it doesn't follow any trend that we normally see with, you know, stocking our station. Yeah. While we're talking about things shifting, I wanted to talk to you about bananas, which is the kind of soft serve wing of Morgan Stearns in that place on Rivington. I know that you had it as dairy free for a while and then you reintroduced dairy.

25:26What kind of prompted the decision to make bananas in the first place and then to introduce dairy as an element? I wanted to do a soft serve concept for a long time. Soft serve is really tricky. It's a totally different animal from hard pack ice cream. And we always wanted to do something with non-dairy. Morgan Stearns has always had non-dairy on the menu from the very beginning. and when we opened the big store we had a non-dairy flavor in every single category plus all of our sorbets were non-dairy so I was serving more non-dairy product than many places that were all non-dairy just and the number of selections that you could have and we were formulating every non-dairy flavor just based on what the ingredients were so people say oh what kind of milk are you using say well we would make the milk for each one depending on what we want the flavor profile of the flavor to be.

26:17So I was interested in it when we did it at Rivington last year. It was very successful, but we found it very challenging. The medium for me with blending the milks, making all the milks from scratch, it was limiting for us with what flavors we could do sticking to non-dairy. So it was really just too limiting for the kind of experience that I think people want to have with soft serve. That would be my short answer is why we did that. So it just offers a lot more flexibility for what we can do with the concept. Yeah, it's interesting because I think maybe consumers would think that opening with non-dairy was more of a statement on like increased interest in non-dairy ice cream or like plant-based eating in general.

27:06But you're saying for you, it was more about soft serve itself. It was about, yeah, for us, it's about the flavor. You know, New York is its own market and you have a lot of people who are interested in a lot of different things. My experience with the non-dairy consumer is that they are a small and loud minority. So there's like not like they're making a lot of noise, but they're not actually driving that many transactions. And so like maybe 25 or 30 percent of our customers were like exclusively non-dairy and that's why they were there and they're excited about it. But if you have the other two thirds that are like, I'm here because I want soft serve.