Nico Vergara was traveling through New Zealand when he first tried the island nation’s distinctive ice cream style. While visiting Auckland, Vergara walked up to what looked like a converted horse trailer and, as tourists do, ordered a flavor he had never seen before: hokey pokey, a combination of vanilla ice cream and honeycomb toffee.
That’s when things got strange. Instead of scooping both ingredients into a cup or cone, the clerk dropped them both into a mechanical funnel and pressed a button, smashing the ice cream and candy together into a dreamy blend.
“I was just crazy intrigued by it,” Vergara said. “And then we had this funny conversation, where I was like, ‘What is this?’”
“Ice cream,” they said.
“I understand, but what just happened?”
As Vergara soon learned, what had happened was his introduction to an ice cream style he would help bring to Portland, and that will soon form the base of Nico’s Ice Cream, a new ice cream shop set to open in Northeast Portland this fall.
After returning to Portland in 2016, Vergara hooked up with the owners of Zeds Real Fruit Ice Cream, a New Zealand-style ice cream truck that started in Southeast Portland and now spends summers at the Oregon Zoo. But after moving to Texas to open a Zeds outpost in Austin, Vergara returned to his hometown to launch his own business. After kicking off with a few pop-ups earlier this year, Nico’s Ice Cream landed a prime spot at Prost Marketplace, Portland’s premier food cart pod, where it served waffle cones filled with pastel-tinted fresh fruit ice cream from July to September. (Nico’s cart at Prost is where I first tried the style -- consider me a convert.)
In November, Vergara hopes to open a new brick-and-mortar shop in a former pottery and plant store on Northeast Fremont Street. This new Nico’s Ice Cream -- Vergara hopes to bring the cart back to Prost next year -- will serve waffle cones filled with Tillamook ice cream and Oregon-grown berries smashed in a New Zealand-built Little Jem blender.
Though it resembles soft serve, New Zealand-style ice cream actually comes to its texture from the opposite angle. Traditional soft serve is made from a chilled liquid mix that gets frozen and aerated to order. At Nico’s, already frozen ice cream gets smashed in a funnel using a motorized auger -- imagine the drill-like plastic anchors used to hold beach blankets in place and you’re close. In New Zealand, the ice cream style is often found at berry farms, and the Little Jem company boasts exporting its machines to Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Though Vergara’s first taste of New Zealand-style ice cream involved candy, Nico’s Ice Cream sticks to berries, with blueberry, raspberry, marionberry and strawberry options available, all kept frozen to preserve the texture. Vegan pints will be pre-batched using Eugene’s own Coconut Bliss. Once the shop is up and running, Vergara hopes to develop his own ice cream bases and waffle cones, and could even revive his “Nico’s at Night” pop-up, which featured ice creams insta-blended with Fruit Loops, Reese’s Puffs or Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
The Grant High School grad is well aware that November isn’t the ideal time to open an ice cream shop in Portland. But that isn’t stopping him.
“In my opinion there’s never going to be the perfect time or perfect place to do this,” Vergara said. “I was looking for a while for a brick-and-mortar, and this space came up. It’s in my neighborhood, it’s on a great street and has character. I did not want to pass this up.”
Through the winter, Vergara plans to keep his Rose City Park and Cully neighbors warm by offering drip coffee and local pastries. He’s already reached out to one friend and former collaborator -- Lisa Nguyen of HeyDay, the mochi doughnut maker that has plans for a brick-and-mortar of its own at Southeast Portland’s CORE food hall.
Nico’s Ice Cream plans to open its new shop this November at 5713 N.E. Fremont St., near Peter’s Bar & Grill and across from the Fire on the Mountain brewpub; Instagram: @nicosicecream
— Michael Russell, mrussell@oregonian.com, @tdmrussell
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