Fall and Winter Hours!

Hello, friends! Thanks to all of you for making this a great summer. Now that the weather’s cooling down, we’re switching to our fall hours. As of October 15th, our hours will be:

Monday through Thursday 2pm to 10pm

Friday and Saturday 12pm to 11pm

Sunday 12pm to 10pm

Once we’ve switched to our fall hours, we’ll be bringing back Sunday brunch and ice cream flights. We’ll be making facebook event pages for both brunch and flights, so you’ll always know when they’re happening! And we’ll also be adding more baked goods and hot drink specials in the next week or two, so come in for ganache hot chocolate, coconut cake, and more!

Announcement: Closed Monday, June 30th.

Sorry for the short notice, folks, but we will be closed tomorrow (Monday, June 30, 2014). We just replaced most of our refrigerators and freezers with a walk-in cooler. To prepare for the installation, we had to whittle down our supply of refrigerated and frozen goods (i.e. most of the things we sell). Then the installation (and subsequent total kitchen reorganization) took longer than we expected, so we couldn’t start Sunday production in time to make enough ice cream for Monday.

Thanks for your understanding! We look forward to scooping up treats for y’all on Tuesday.

Spring happenings!

Hey everyone! It’s finally feeling a little like spring around here (yeah, we know, the first OFFICIAL day of spring is a while off, but hey, it’s North Carolina.)

With that in mind, we’ve decided March is a great time to start opening our doors 7 days a week. We’re also going back to our “busy season” hours. So, starting on Friday March 7th, we’ll be opening at noon again. Sundays through Thursdays, hours will be noon to ten p.m., and Fridays and Saturdays, hours will be noon to eleven p.m. March 10th will be our first Monday open.

Our second piece of news is something that’s been in the works for, well, YEARS. We are finally going to start offering ice cream flights! For now, these will only be available on Friday evenings. Every week, we will pick a theme, and offer a four-flavor flight that’s only available that day, with flavors and toppings you won’t find on the regular menu. Flight service begins on Friday March 7th, and the theme is the Caribbean, where Mrs. Parlour grew up. And yes, we will be playing lots of reggae and calypso music that night! We will post the menu closer to the 7th, both here and on facebook.

Let us know in the comments if you have suggestions for future flight themes, and we’ll pick our favorite for the second flight! The winner gets a free flight on us.

Holiday Hours

Christmas and New Year’s are fast approaching. You’re probably wondering what our holiday hours are going to be like! Here are the important details.

Xmas

We’re closing early Christmas Eve, so we’ll be open just four hours, from 2:00–6:00 pm.

For Christmas Day, we were thinking of opening for maybe four or five hours, depending on demand. We haven’t actually finalized the specifics.. If you were thinking of strolling around downtown on Christmas day, let us know in the comments what time you would want us to be open. (Don’t worry, we’re not making our employees work; it’ll just be Mr. and Mrs. Parlour!)

If you’d like to stock up on pints to have at home for the holiday, they’ll be on sale the weekend before Christmas!

New Year’s

We will be open standard hours on New Year’s Eve, but Closed New Year’s Day.

Winter Break

We’re taking some time off at the beginning of January to unwind and do some business planning for the year ahead. So the shop will be Closed from January 1st–13th. We’ll reopen Tuesday the 14th.

Ice cream brunch? Yes.

Here at The Parlour HQ (aka our dining room table, for now) we’ve been talking about having a once-monthly Sunday ice cream brunch. I think we came up with the idea after seeing Molly Moon mention serving oatmeal topped with ice cream at one of their shops. Since we’re curious about whether this is something folks would actually be interested in, here’s a sample menu we’ve been fiddling around with:

Slow-cooked steel cut oats topped with a scoop of cinnamon ice cream and housemade preserves

Buttermilk pancakes topped with banana ice cream, pecans, and maple syrup

House granola+your choice of yogurt, non-dairy milk, or a scoop of frozen yogurt

Sourdough cinnamon rolls, seasonal scones and coffee cakes

And, of course, fresh juice, espresso drinks and hand-dripped coffees.

So what do y’all think? Would you come out for ice cream brunch? Our seating will be a bit more limited than most restaurants, so we’d probably make the hours longer than most brunch places. And in the summertime there will be plenty of room out in the plaza/in front of the shop. Let us know what you think in the comments (or if you’ve got any menu suggestions), and we’ll pick a random commenter to win a jar of our granola!

Things are happening (and other stuff too.)

Well, we’ve just returned from what is sure to be our last vacation in a looong time. I’m calling it the Mini Ice Cream Tour of the Northeast. We consumed ice cream from Little Baby’s Ice Cream, Capogiro (okay, that was gelato…and we went at least three times), The Franklin Fountain, Arethusa, and the Farmer’s Cow. Most of our ice cream eating was done in Philly, the city we moved from, and the reason we opened an ice cream business. For some reason, there are way more ice cream joints in the northeast than down south. When we moved here, we were stunned (surprised? some other word?) at the lack of ice cream parlours in our new town. So when Yoni decided grad school wasn’t for him, it seemed only natural that we’d fill the ice cream void in Durham. Now that we make ice cream for a living, it’s interesting to go back to the places we used to frequent and see if they’re as good as we remembered (mostly, yes!) (more…)