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[title]I like to think that I was one of the first people to buy Kate Schrire’s ice cream.
Back in 2011 (or thereabouts) Starlings – still one of my favourite coffee shops in Cape Town, and helpfully just up the road from my house – was hosting a market in the back garden for small-scale producers and sellers. There was a stall selling fresh fish (what would later grow into Ocean Jewels, in Woodstock), wonderful breads, local honey from suburban hives and – at one table – a cooler of what would fast become my favourite ice cream in Cape Town.
The Creamery was tiny then. One churn, a compact kitchen and a handful of flavours shaped largely by whatever local farmers happened to be harvesting. And, the most important ingredient of all, owners with a passion for ice cream.
Kate (and her co-founder Marianne Visser) stuck to their principles: proper ice cream, made with real eggs, good dairy and seasonal produce. There would be strawberry when strawberries were growing. Stone fruit when the orchards delivered. Only ever 65% couverture for the tubs of excellent chocolate. And, perhaps beyond her delicious ‘sweet cream’ vanilla, no obligation at all to keep every flavour available all year simply because customers had fallen in love with it.
Over the years, I watched The Creamery grow store by store, and flavour by flavour. I wrote about them for any magazine that would listen, and watched as they morphed from a market stall into proper cafés spread from Newlands to Woodstock to Mouille Point to Claremont. Cape Town discovered sea salt caramel. We waited patiently for lemon curd in winter. We loved the Belgian-style waffles that made ice cream the right answer on even the coldest Cape winter’s day.
And the stores were a vibe too. Bright, welcoming spaces. Pops of colour. Staff that really wanted you to keep tasting until you found a flavour you loved.
Staff that loved to tell you which was their favourite flavour. Try this one, they’d insist.
That might have caused a queue to form, but who cared? These were cosy places with cool playlists. Ask what was good and you didn’t get a shrug or a finger pointed at the menu board; you got passionate opinions. It wasn’t just a place to get an incredible ice cream. The Creamery was an escape; a space where the world felt good for a little while.
And then, slowly, but surely, it wasn’t.
My local branch at Palmyra Junction became drab and lifeless, the plants forlorn and the walls bare. The space felt forgotten. There was little atmosphere and even less reason to stay once your order had been handed across the counter.
Newlands remained a reliable stop on the school run, but on my last few visits the staff could hardly have looked less interested. They didn’t care whether I had conquered Scoop Mountain (IYKYK), or bother to share which flavours were new or worth a taste.
Mouille Point kept its queue, but that was hardly surprising. Put almost any ice cream shop opposite the Promenade and somebody will buy a cone. But even there, the old spark was missing. So it came as no surprise to hear last week that The Creamery is closing all four stores in Cape Town.
Schrire sold the business in 2023, another victim of the pandemic, and I think that was the beginning of the end. Food Lover’s Market – through the Seattle Coffee Co. brand – may have saved the brand from a pandemic, but it didn’t secure its future. The passion had gone; it was a brand in a stable of others, and the lack of an owner at the wheel was all too obvious every time I stepped through the door (hoping that, maybe this time, it will be different).
Last weekend I stopped in at Palmyra Junction for one last scoop before it closed for good. A half-and-half, of course, because in The Creamery two halves are always bigger than a single scoop.
Again, IYKYK.
Or, perhaps, that should be If You Knew You Knew.
The official explanation for the closing of The Creamery is wrapped in corporate language that has no place in a homegrown artisan ice cream company. According to Food Lover’s Market, the brand no longer forms part of its “long-term strategic focus”.
That may explain why the plug is being pulled, but it does little to explain why a business once so full of colour and personality was allowed to simply melt away.
I don’t know who was responsible for running The Creamery after the founders sold up, but it was clear – at least to me – that the passion was never really there. The Creamery was always about more than good ice cream. It was about fun, seasons, a sense of place in a way that no other local ice cream brand has managed to create, before or since.
So yes, Cape Town should mourn the shuttering of The Creamery. Talks of a brand buyout may well come about, but unless the new owners bring the same passion, creativity and sheer joy in the simple pleasures of a cone, I’m not sure it’ll succeed.
But for now, thank you, Kate and Co. Your ice cream parlours saved many a frazzled parent on a rainy day. You showed us that passion counts more than profit. You created a true Cape Town original and were an important part of the city’s artisan food coming of age. I’ll sure miss finally reaching the giddy heights on the summit of Scoop Mountain.
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