I Scream, You Scream, We're Screaming for More Soft-Serve Ice Cream

Denver has no shortage of ice cream options. While Little Man's iconic, 28-foot-tall milk can in LoHi might be the most well known, this city has a truly impressive range of choices that are scooping up seriously good frozen treats.

There's Bonnie Brae, a classic ice cream parlor that still draws long lines on hot days after 37 years in business, and newcomer Sadboy Creamery, which leans into nostalgia with flavors like rainbow sherbet and Cookie Circus, made with icing-covered animal crackers.

Pandemic startup turned brick-and-mortar Right Cream is known for its super-creamy consistency and fully loading housemade mix-ins like Oreo toffee and almost-too-salty caramel. High Point Creamery gets chef-y with its flavors, serving scoops of Earl Grey and shortbread or basil and blackberry.

Heaven Creamery is all about all-natural ingredients, while you can get Thai-style rolled ice cream at Milkroll Creamery. From the munchies-worthy creations at Ice Cream Riot to Liks Ice Cream, Sweet Action, Sweet Cow and Inside Scoop, there's an ice cream party happening around virtually every corner.
But it seems that one type of ice cream hasn't gotten an invite to that party: soft serve. "Just go to Dairy Queen or McDonald's," a friend recently said as I lamented the lack of soft-serve stands in Denver for about the millionth time.

"You don't get it," I replied.

I grew up on soft serve — or, as it's known in my home state of Vermont, creemees. Pretty much every town there has a creemee stand (maybe two, if it's a town with more than one traffic light), and pretty much everyone goes to them in the evenings, all summer long.

Because of Vermont's harsh winters, creemee stands are largely seasonal, but for an elementary school kid, that just adds to the appeal. The magic of summer break truly begins when the stand opens and you run into friends as you wait in line for your towering cone, licking up the ice cream as quickly as possible as it melts all over your hands or, worse, falls off the cone. Maple is a classic choice in Vermont, for obvious reasons, but you can never go wrong with a vanilla and chocolate twist, either.

It's not just the ice cream that I crave — because sure, I could (and sometimes do) get a fix at a fast-food spot...if the machines are working. But I miss the whole package: the sense of having a simple, no-frills community gathering place where people come together for one of life's purest joys.
There are a few old-school soft-serve stands scattered around Colorado's mountain towns that remind me of home. My favorite is K's Dairy Delite in Buena Vista, where you can get a burger, fries and a cone that you gobble up in the park right behind the popular pit stop.

But Denver only has one major player in the soft-serve game. Dang, located in Park Hill at the Oneida Park shopping center, is an offshoot of Little Man that opened in 2019. It's a modernized take on the classic soft-serve stand, with Keith Haring-like graphics on the walls, purple hand-shaped chairs and an AstroTurf-covered area out front that's typically filled with kids playing on sunny days. It also serves French fries and recently added chicken tenders to satisfy the many high-schoolers who head to the shopping center on their lunch break.

"Little Man's genre was always kind of this old-fashioned roadside attraction, and we wanted to do something that was like the older sister who was the punk," recalls Basha Cohen, Little Man's director of marketing. "It has been phenomenal. This is an underserved soft-serve market."

Also in 2019, Little Man, which now also has locations in Central Park, Englewood and Denver International Airport) in addition to Dang, Sweet Cooie's and Old Town Churn in Fort Collins, added a scoop shop that doubles as a factory for ice cream production on West Colfax Avenue. "Where we have this huge production facility that we have to feed the beast of all of the different stores and wholesalers and all of that, Dang is a business that can actually be maintained in the shop," Cohen notes.
"We are our own factory," says Dang general manager Michael Clemons, who is also in charge of developing flavors for the shop, which rotate every three to four weeks. "We try to make it feel like a childhood retro vibe. We try to mimic the seasons," he adds, noting that Dang doesn't use any preservatives and instead leans into fresh, local, natural ingredients whenever possible.

Dang offers eight options at a time, and they're paired in the machines to create the best possible twist combos. Currently, you can opt for the classic chocolate and vanilla; Brown Sugar Cookie Dough and Animal Circus; or Nutella with a Little Man staple, Salted Oreo. Dang also always has two vegan soft-serve options in flavors like Chocolate Ganache and Orangsicle, a current summer hit. I'm hoping for maple to make an appearance one day, of course. There's a long list of topping options, too, plus sundaes, floats and other specialty items.

The process for making soft-serve ice cream, which is essentially just regular ice cream with more air mixed in, is pretty simple, Clemons notes. "We get our base from Meadow Gold. They all come in a twelve-quart container. We pour it all into the machine, mix all the ingredients by hand, and from start to finish, a batch takes about ten to twenty minutes," he says.

The hardest part of the process, really, is cleaning the machines, according to Claire Nafziger, general manager of Sofia's, a Roman-style pizza concept that opened on the 16th Street Mall earlier this year. Its only dessert option is a small cup of soft-serve ice cream, available for $3 with two topping choices: olive oil and Maldon sea salt; or fennel pollen, which has a very slight black licorice flavor, and what she calls "the ultimate local honey," which comes from hives on top of the nearby Sugar Building. There's also a secret menu item, the Full Monty, which includes all four toppings plus a Luxardo cherry.
The dessert has been such a hit that some people — including me — have come back just for a soft-serve fix, Nafziger adds. Other restaurants, please take note.

At MoCha in Aurora, you can get mochi doughnuts, coffee, matcha lattes and soft serve in three flavors — matcha, True Milk and yogurt, as well as a rotating flavor of the week. Snowl, also in Aurora, has a similar selection; at both, you can get your ice cream in a taiyaki, a Japanese fish-shaped cake.

Jeremiah's, an Italian ice chain that started in Florida and now has a location inside the Freedom Street Social food hall in Arvada, will layer Italian ice with soft serve, which you can also get on its own in a cup or cone. And Happy Cones is a food truck that also has locations in two food halls, Edgewater Public Market and Golden Mill. It specializes in New Zealand-style soft serve, which is made with real fruit.

While all of these takes are tasty, none of them really captures the full soft-serve stand experience of my youth in the way that places like K's do. Even Colorado Springs has more soft-serve stands than Denver, with spots like Drive In Tasty Freeze and BJ's Velvet Freeze. There's the more modern Frozen Gold, too, a concept from the group behind Fat Sully's, Atomic Cowboy and Denver Biscuit Company. (Time to bring one to your hometown, okay? Thanks!)

Yes, it's difficult to create something brand-new that feels nostalgic; there's no substitute for an actual stand that's been around for years, maybe decades. Dang comes the closest with its Park Hill spot, and the team there knows it has a winner on its hands; Cohen says the brand may expand in the coming years.

That's a start, but it still leaves plenty of unserved demand for people like me who are softies for soft serve. If frozen yogurt got its moment in the sun when that craze hit in the early 2000s, surely it's time to turn the spotlight on soft serve — even if that means the cone will melt a little faster.