Highland Park Corner Store is the kind of place that should be in every neighborhood. It sells a selection of local beers and chocolates and so on; it has breakfast tacos and sandwiches you can eat sitting down at some diner-style booths in the middle of the shop; and it has ice cream, specifically New Zealand–style ice cream.
New Zealand has a style of ice cream? It sure does. Owner Meaghan Haas spent her late teens and university years in the country, and a few years ago, she bought a Little Gem machine to bring this style of dessert to West Seattle. (She operates Tip Top Ice Cream as its own brand inside the store.) It is basically an industrial-strength blender. You take a plastic cone and put in regular ice cream (the shop has a coconut base for vegans) along with your choice of frozen fruit. Then you put the cone on the blender, and after a few moments of grinding, out comes a mixture of cold fruit and light, soft–serve–style ice cream.
A lot of people get mango, Haas says, but she prefers a mix of blackberries and raspberries, which makes a sweet-tart concoction with lots of pleasantly gritty bits in it. The fruit-soft-serve mashup resembles a cross between ice cream and a smoothie — less extravagant than some of the sundaes you see around town, and more focused on the seasons. Haas says they’ll offer marionberries and even tay berries when they’re available, and in the winter they do a lemon version that includes some of the rind for a trace of bitterness.
Could New Zealand–style ice cream be a trend? Maybe! If you aren’t in West Seattle, Many Bennies over in Fremont uses the same Little Gem machine.
