Photographs by Larry Heng
It’s nearly impossible to be unhappy while eating ice cream—that’s why the perennially popular foodstuff is often thought of as the antidote to breakups, bad days, and yes, the pandemic blues.
As of December 2020, according to Restaurants Canada, 10,000 restaurants had closed down across the country. In Toronto, however, it seemed like one type of eatery was scooping up business—ice cream and gelato shops.
Toronto has been blessed with an onslaught of ice-cold treats, giving those of us with a sweet tooth the chance to plan cross-city ice cream crawls or simply stock our freezers with pints. So what makes this beloved dessert the crème-de-la-crème of the pandemic food scene?
“Ice cream is fun. I think that it’s joyful,” says Ashley Wittig, who owns Honey’s Ice Cream, a plant-based scoop shop near Dundas and Dufferin Streets. “It’s also affordable… maybe you’re not going to be able to afford something that’s $200, or a $100 dinner, but you can probably afford a $6 ice cream cone."
Eating an ice cream cone, Wittig says, is also a delicious way to practice mindfulness––a wellness activity that became particularly popular during the pandemic.
“When you’re eating a cone, you can’t be daydreaming; you need to be present,” she explains. If you’re distracted, you end up with a melty mess all over your hands.
Wittig founded the popular gluten-free and vegan bakery Bunner’s and took a break from the food industry after selling the business. Upon noticing a gap in the Toronto market for high-quality, dairy-free ice cream, she started recipe testing for Honey’s in late 2018. She began selling her cashew-based pints in weekly drops and after generating word-of-mouth hype, opened her first storefront on December 20, 2020, in the heart of Dundas West.
Like Wittig, Luanne Ronquillo developed an almost cult-like following around her ice cream brand Ruru Baked during the pandemic before opening a brick-and-mortar scoop shop at Bloor and Lansdowne in January 2021. Both businesses thrived throughout the winter, thanks to their dedicated fans—and stellar products.
Ruru Baked began as an evenings-and-weekends-only endeavour back in 2017. But after losing her nine-to-five gig at the start of the pandemic, Ronquillo went all-in on ice cream. Now, she couldn’t be happier working with her team to create small-batch, custard-based flavours like banoffee pie, miso-butterscotch and pandan.
Demand for Ruru Baked pints got so high during the pandemic that Ronquillo was compelled to scale up her business.
“I think the pandemic actually helped us in that way where people wanted to support local businesses and all you could do at the time was eat if you were leaving the house… and we provided comfort food for people,” she says.
By opening in the middle of a lockdown, she and her team were able to start slow with an almost three-month soft launch. They were also aware of pandemic-related restrictions from the get-go.
“We built the service for a pandemic scenario, whereas I think a lot of businesses that had dine-in services, it was really hard for them,” she says.
East of Yonge Street, Parry Sohi signed a lease on a space for his flagship gelato shop in February 2020, mere weeks before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic and the city shut down.
Prior to setting up his ice cream HQ at Yonge and Charles Streets, Sohi ran Nani’s Gelato out of a commissary kitchen in Mississauga and sold his Indian, Asian-fusion and Italian-inspired gelato from a food truck he drove all around Toronto. His new space now provides customers with a more permanent gelato fix and gives him, and his co-chef Christie Lai, space to create new flavours for their ever-evolving menu, which switches up every two weeks.
That rotating menu, revealed on Mondays via Instagram, helped build Nani’s loyal following. In fact, Sohi credits social media and digital communications with propelling his brand forward.
“I think the ability to communicate digitally now through those social media platforms can make or break a business. I don’t think it’s much more complicated than that,” he says. That means interacting with customers via comments and direct messages and enticing folks with the flavours they can expect in-store.
Sohi has even gotten flavour suggestions from customers, especially for nostalgic flavours based on childhood memories of specific, regional foods from all over the world—like gulab jamun and falooda, which are currently in development. Not to mention, Nani’s most popular flavour is Punjabi milk cake, a take on the Indian dessert.
Like Nani’s, both Wittig and Ronquillo also tap into nostalgia with their flavours—think Milo, Ribena and a McCain’s Deep and Delicious-inspired flavour at Ruru Baked and peanut butter and saltine crackers at Honey’s.
If ice cream wasn’t happy-making enough, these nostalgia-inducing flavours give customers a sweet taste of the past—ultimately providing a lick of an escape during the pandemic.
