The best ice cream is often the ice cream you’re eating. It could be the chalky layers of vanilla and strawberry beneath the cake crumbs of a Good Humor bar. The stabilizer-filled soft serve from a fast food restaurant. The fast-melting cone of chocolate malted krunch from your local pharmacy. But if you were to press me for the ice cream I crave melting on my tongue above all others, it might be the strawberry ice cream from Bradley Ray.
I first tried Ray’s ice cream at Antico Nuovo, Chad Colby’s Larchmont Italian restaurant. There, he and Colby made fior di latte ice cream crowded with swirling ribbons of olive oil, flakes of salt and grilled focaccia. And a strawberry ice cream that recalibrated what I thought I knew, loved and desired about ice cream. It had a silky smooth, luxurious texture, bursting with fruit from Harry’s Berries, the Oxnard farm behind the most sought-after strawberries in the country.
Now, Ray is behind Henry’s Secret Ice Cream, a pop-up hosting weekly drops of his Harry’s Berries-filled strawberry ice cream, and a host of other seasonal flavors out of the old Hall Pass ice cream parlor in West Hollywood. Flavors are posted on the website and via the Instagram account every Wednesday at noon. Customers are given a pickup window to retrieve their pints from the shop on either Friday or Saturday.
Recently, there was strawberry ice cream made with puréed Harry’s Berries, sugar, a touch of lemon juice and vanilla paste. Ray folds in macerated strawberries to ensure maximum strawberry potential in each spoonful.
“When I was a kid, I loved eating Breyerswith my family,” says Ray. There were these little chunks in it and that was my favorite part. I put the chopped little strawberries in there to get a little fruit texture once in a while.”
Each pint is brimming with enough fruit, cookies, sauce or brittle to feel like a composed dessert. The mascarpone stracciatella is seasoned with a little dried sherry and packed with melted dark chocolate and Amarena cherries. Imagine a sophisticated, wonderfully sweet-tart Cherry Garcia.
The Milk and Honey is a play on a dessert Ray spent seven years making at NoMad in New York City and Los Angeles. He layers an ultra milky fior di latte ice cream with honey and oat shortbread, buckwheat honey caramel and crumbled honey brittle.
“At NoMad, ice cream was integral to every dessert that we made,” he says. “I grew to love it.”
The restaurant is also where Ray spent 15 to 18 hours a day making ice cream with his friend Henry Molina, the inspiration for Henry’s Secret Ice Cream.
“We lost Henry to cancer in 2022, and I wanted this to be a tribute to him,” he says. “It’s nice to keep his memory alive with ice cream.”
After leaving Antico, Ray started working as a private chef, but he never really let go of his love of making ice cream. Last summer, Ray began selling ice cream through direct messages on Instagram. He delivered the pints via the trunk of his car at a Vons parking lot in Arcadia.
“I was just playing around to see if people would be interested in coming to pick it up,” he says.
People were interested, and Ray was busy making 120 pints a day out of his home kitchen. Last year, Lawrence Longo, the restaurateur behind Irv’s Burgers, Prince Street Pizza and Bar Next Door, offered to let Ray make ice cream drops at the former Hall Pass space on Sunset Boulevard.
Using the West Hollywood store, his home kitchen and another ghost kitchen, Ray is able to make about 340 pints of ice cream a week. With the help of Joanne Bae, his first employee, he’s hoping to make 600.
The pints of ice cream run for $18, or $23 for fruit-forward flavors like the strawberry. It’s a high price compared to your average grocery store pint, due to Ray’s sourcing of premium ingredients and seasonal fruit from the farmers market. The cost of ingredients also means he’ll be sticking to ice cream versus sorbet, which requires a higher concentration of fruit. A carton of Harry’s Berries ranges in price from around $15 to $22, depending on the variety.
“Sorbets, as much as I’d like to sell them, it’s so hard to ask someone for $34 for a pint,” Ray says. “And if you’re using premium products, there’s really no way around it.”
For now, he plans on keeping a classic vanilla for the purists, and possibly the strawberry. The other flavors will be up to his weekly whims. Maybe strawberry shortcake, cold brew-infused coffee ice cream with chocolate salted caramel, or pistachio brittle.
The goal is to increase production with another facility and a bigger team. Right now, the weekly drops are selling out in as little as 23 minutes.
“I want this to grow organically into something I’m proud of and that Henry would be proud of and that this community really loves,” he says. “If we’re not having fun, what are we doing?”
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