Bourbon and toasted cornflakes. Peanut butter and curry. Strawberry and candied jalapeños. These pairings may sound like fodder for a $200 tasting menu, but on an unassuming corner of San Francisco's Mission District, they're just three of the 12 listings on the daily flavor board of Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream. Founded four years ago by pastry chef Jake Godby and his business partner Sean Vahey, Humphry Slocombe has a reputation usually reserved for four-star restaurants: Michael Mina awarded it with a Google Favorite Places prize, Todd Selby photographed it and even Ferran Adrià has dropped by for a cone.
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"We're very personality-driven," says Godby. While he hammers out new flavors like Jesus Juice Sorbet (with red wine and Coca-Cola) and Elvis (the Fat Years), featuring bananas and bacon peanut brittle, Vahey maintains the shop's nearly 300,000-follower Twitter feed, posting dirty jokes ("Lick some melons!" recommended one endorsement for Salted Watermelon Sorbet) and photos of the cool, heavily tattooed staff. "At any given time, half of our employees are in a band," says Godby; when local rockers Girls blew up, he lost a scooper who doubled as their tour manager.
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"Did they manage to sprinkle crack into my scoop of ice cream on my last visit, or am I just being paranoid?" -- Tiffany M., Yelp Reviewer
Humphry Slocombe is so popular that the queue for a scoop has become almost as famous as the shop's innovative flavors. "Any ice cream parlor that needs a dedicated bouncer to shut down their line is clearly powered by something greater than high-butterfat cream," says San Francisco Examiner food critic Jesse Hirsch, who once spent an evening following Slocombe employees as they turned away hordes of customers who showed up after the shop's 9 p.m. closing time. One longtime employee tells us he's heard every excuse in the book, from weddings to engagements to dying friends in the hospital. Customers' devotion to Slocombe's ice cream even extends to their pets: Godby recalls a woman who bought a pint of Malted Dulce de Leche as a last meal for her leukemia-stricken cat, and McEvoy Olive Oil is a favorite treat for dogs, whose owners dish it up to help improve their coats.
Thanks to breathless word of mouth, press and, of course, those 300,000 Twitter followers, the world beyond San Francisco is beginning to take note. Godby and Vahey recently published their first cookbook, in which every recipe can be made with Cuisinart's $60 ice-cream maker. Some naysayers might consider his concoctions too unusual, but Godby's sticking to his guns. "We'll have flavors that are a little bit more divisive than others, that won't sell as much, but they're flavors that we love."
"We're very personality-driven," says Godby. While he hammers out new flavors like Jesus Juice Sorbet (with red wine and Coca-Cola) and Elvis (the Fat Years), featuring bananas and bacon peanut brittle, Vahey maintains the shop's nearly 300,000-follower Twitter feed, posting dirty jokes ("Lick some melons!" recommended one endorsement for Salted Watermelon Sorbet) and photos of the cool, heavily tattooed staff. "At any given time, half of our employees are in a band," says Godby; when local rockers Girls blew up, he lost a scooper who doubled as their tour manager.
"Did they manage to sprinkle crack into my scoop of ice cream on my last visit, or am I just being paranoid?" -- Tiffany M., Yelp Reviewer
Humphry Slocombe is so popular that the queue for a scoop has become almost as famous as the shop's innovative flavors. "Any ice cream parlor that needs a dedicated bouncer to shut down their line is clearly powered by something greater than high-butterfat cream," says San Francisco Examiner food critic Jesse Hirsch, who once spent an evening following Slocombe employees as they turned away hordes of customers who showed up after the shop's 9 p.m. closing time. One longtime employee tells us he's heard every excuse in the book, from weddings to engagements to dying friends in the hospital. Customers' devotion to Slocombe's ice cream even extends to their pets: Godby recalls a woman who bought a pint of Malted Dulce de Leche as a last meal for her leukemia-stricken cat, and McEvoy Olive Oil is a favorite treat for dogs, whose owners dish it up to help improve their coats.
Thanks to breathless word of mouth, press and, of course, those 300,000 Twitter followers, the world beyond San Francisco is beginning to take note. Godby and Vahey recently published their first cookbook, in which every recipe can be made with Cuisinart's $60 ice-cream maker. Some naysayers might consider his concoctions too unusual, but Godby's sticking to his guns. "We'll have flavors that are a little bit more divisive than others, that won't sell as much, but they're flavors that we love."