Hi everyone! There’s a lot of new and exciting stuff happening in The Parlour world these days, and we thought it’d be easier to put it all together here instead of spreading it across a million billion tweets.

Location, location, location

Okay, we’ve been talking for a while about our plans to open a brick and mortar shop. And we know people are excited about it because a whole lot of y’all pitched in for kitchen equipment. Now that we’ve signed the lease and revealed the location to our Kickstarter backers, we’re excited to announce it to the whole wide internet: The Parlour will be located at 117 Market St. in Downtown Durham!

We’re thrilled about this location, for plenty of reasons. The building is owned by Selp-Help, a credit union known for its support of local businesses. The specific space has a history of local frozen goodness, having formerly housed the production kitchen for Locopops. The new location is right across from CCB Plaza, home of the Bull Statue. So in addition to the indoor seating we’ll provide, there’ll be plenty of nearby space to enjoy your ice cream outdoors with friends! And we’ll be within walking distance of lots of other great establishments, new and old. We’ll be just a few minutes from The Pinhook, Toast, DaisyCakes, Rue Cler, Reliable Cheese, Mateo Tapas, Alley Twenty-Six, Bull City Burger and Brewery, Pizzeria Toro, Loaf, the future home of Monuts Donuts, and many many more!

Another great neighbor will be Center Studio Architecture, who are designing the space with us. They’ve done lots of work in Downtown, including Toast and DaisyCakes, and their own new home in the Five Points Project.

We’d love to provide an opening date now, but we’re really new at this and we know there are always going to be surprises. We’re pretty confident we’ll open in the winter, letting us deal with the new learning curve in the slow season. Of course, we’ll be updating folks when the schedules come more into focus.

Speaking of dates and slow seaons

Okay, here’s the slightly disappointing news: we’ll only be open for business with the bus for another few weeks. Planning and building out our shop will take a lot of work and a lot of meetings, and we need to reclaim some of our time to manage the opening quickly enough. Our last public day of bus sales this year will be October 14th. We’ll be at a lot of cool events before then, including the Pinhook’s outdoor Pride concert this Saturday, The Cookery’s Emily K Center benefit next weekend, and a food truck rodeo at Wheels Fun Park on the 14th. If you’ve got a hankering for sundaes and shakes, come find us soon!

By the way, don’t worry: the bus will be back in the spring. It’ll be at food truck rodeos and other public events, as well as being available for private catering. We’ll probably start out the bus’s next season with fewer hours than we’ve been out in the past. But depending on when we hire a trustworthy driver, you may see even more of The Parlour’s mobile scoops than ever!

“But, but… the ice cream!”

We know you’re gonna miss us. We’ll miss you too. But we want to reassure you that you’ll still be able to get our ice cream when neither bus nor shop are open. Until the shop is ready for production, we’re keeping our membership at The Cookery and will continue to make ice cream for our wholesale accounts.

You can already pick up assorted pints at Parker and Otis in Brightleaf Square or Bull Street Gourmet and Market, and ice cream sandwiches at Bean Traders’ Ninth St. location. Some of our ice cream will also be available at Market St. Coffee and Ice Cream in Carrboro. This is the new business in the former home of the Maple View Farms shop near the co-op. They’re scooping ice cream from several local producers; we’ll be providing the vegan options plus a dairy flavor or two. This weekend, our Salted Butter Caramel, Raspberry Cardamom Yogurt, and three coconut-based flavors make their Carrboro debut.

Finally, just like last year, we’ll have some opportunities for you to order some special seasonal flavors in pints and half-gallons in December and November, for pickup at The Cookery, and possibly some other locations if we can work out the details. We’ll be announcing the specifics soon.

Hey, that was a lot of words, wasn’t it? Way too many to tweet. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you soon out in Durham!