Did you know that July is National Ice Cream Month? Naturally, the folks at the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources celebrated the occasion by assembling a Massachusetts “ice cream trail” — a way to introduce people to parlors and creameries around the state that showcase their Bay State roots with local ingredients. The map is due to be released in August.

But on the Vineyard, we’ve already got a veritable ice cream web, spanning all flavors, presentations and methods of creation. Here are three Island businesses, old and new, that prove that the Vineyard is an amazing ice cream destination.

 

Mad Martha’s

Seven days a week, in the back of Mad Martha’s in Oak Bluffs, Bobby Ball is making ice cream. He feeds milk, cream and confectionary bits into a hopper that churns it all together; he then flash-freezes the mixture into something you can scoop. Some gets packed into large drums to be sold in the Oak Bluffs store or carted off to the shop’s Edgartown and Vineyard Haven locations. Some gets stuffed into pints for wholesale, and some gets loaded onto the Mad Martha’s ice cream cart for event catering.

The reason making ice cream is a full-time job, said Bobby, is because on the Vineyard, ice cream is a full-time hobby.

“I go into any of the towns at dinnertime, and there’s hundreds of people waiting in line for what I made that morning,” he said. “It’s pretty cool to be that guy.”

People have been lining up for Mad Martha’s since 1971, when it served its ice cream out of the back of an ambulance. The brand has since transformed many times over – it once took a crack at adding a pizza delivery service, and Giant Grinders, the defunct sister sandwich shop to Mad Martha’s, has come and gone. In 2021, the business was purchased by a group of investors led by Vineyard businessmen Jim Shane and Brook Katzen. General manager Nate Thompson, who has been with the business for 22 years, is also a partial owner.

“We wanted to assure that Mad Martha’s remained a Vineyard-based company,” Jim said.

Questions of “to sandwich or not to sandwich” aside, the business has contended with much more granular changes in consumer tastes. Brook explained that in the early aughts, frozen yogurt was de rigueur, but that non-dairy ice cream quickly overtook it as the crowd favorite ice cream alternative.

The brand has also responded to an increasing preference for locally-sourced ingredients. It offers a coffee flavor infused with an Island-roasted brew from Chilmark Coffee Company, a salted caramel made with Martha’s Vineyard Sea Salt and an apple fritter flavor laden with bits of the popular pastry from Back Door Donuts.

“We’re always trying to stay ahead of consumer preferences [by] listening to what people are asking for,” Brook said.

In this way, Mad Martha’s is a democracy; when the people dethrone one product in favor of another, Brook and Nate listen. Though the brand has been kept alive to preserve an Island tradition, it’s also a brand that is constantly reinventing itself to mirror a changing Vineyard.

“I feel like there’s no reason to kind of dwell on the past,” Nate said. “It’s more about what we’re doing now … But we’re still the same ice cream shop, just doing it a little better than we used to.”

 

Ophelia’s

Not all of the Island’s ice cream ventures reach back to the year of “Dirty Harry” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.” Some are just a few weeks old.

When Stoney Hill Pizza owner Nina Levin (in photo at right) started sister food truck Ophelia’s, she used it exclusively for pastry, serving up cakes and biscuits at The Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival this winter before bringing Ophelia’s to the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market this summer. Before that, it was a dilapidated yellow camper in need of some serious love.

“I bought it from Mermaid Farm because they were throwing it out,” she said. “It was disgusting inside. My dad and I ripped everything out, down to the studs.”

This summer, Nina started using the mobile bakeshop to springboard a dream predating her earliest days in culinary school: making soft-serve ice cream from scratch. She bought a “super fickle” soft-serve machine, got a recipe from a friend and got to work.

Nina prides herself on using local and small-batch ingredients. She sources dairy from Ronnybrook Farm in upstate New York (she uses a blend of cream and milk with five percent fat, which keeps the product creamy without “gumming up the machine”). The fresh strawberry flavor she featured in June used berries from Fire Cat Farm, and her honeycomb flavor pairs local raw honey from Island Bee Company with her homemade toasted honeycomb candy.

“I’m really happy with what products we’re putting in,” she said. “It really makes a difference.”

A short-term goal for Nina is to introduce waffle cones – homemade, of course. Further down the line, she dreams of turning Stoney Hill into a brick-and-mortar pizza joint. When asked if she would consider installing a soft-serve machine, she answered with a resounding “yes.”

Ice Cream and Candy Bazaar

At The Ice Cream and Candy Bazaar in Edgartown, the ice cream itself represents a trail into the past.

Now under the ownership of Kimberly Averill, the retro harborside spot is open for its 50th summer. It was started in 1975 by friends Bonnie Jo Hakala and Geraldine Averill, the latter of whom is Kimberly’s step-grandmother-in-law. Bonnie Jo was just 16 at the time.

In 2020, Bonnie Jo decided to pass on the torch to someone who would do right by the business. She chose Kimberly.

“It’s a rare thing to have a woman owned business that has sustained all these different changes,” she said. “I have big shoes to fill.”

With its black-and-white tiled floors and matrix of penny candy receptacles, the Bazaar might be mistaken for pastiche if it weren’t the real thing. And it’s not just its aesthetics that conjure memories –it’s the very fact of the institution, standing to color Edgartown summers across generations.

“It’s grandparents bringing their grandchildren and saying, ‘I worked here,’” Kim said. One of the Bazaar’s suppliers is Richardson’s, the Middleton, Mass. creamery integral to many a New England childhood. The shop also sells sweets from Massachusetts chocolatier Winfrey’s.

With a half-century behind the Bazaar, Kim is working hard to make sure the spirit of the original operation remains, down to every last Mary Jane.

“I want to keep our pulse on it – the candy trends, the nostalgia,” Kim said.

 

Emma Kilbride is a news intern at the Vineyard Gazette this summer.