Paul Bass Photo
Gateway student Yakira Ralda serves a customer.
Chad Kinsman found a tasty companion for tackling an existential crisis Thursday afternoon, courtesy of two hippies from Vermont: a cup of brown bourbon ice cream.
Kinsman, a Yale School of Drama student, stopped by the new Ben & Jerry’s outlet on Temple Street to order the ice cream before plunging into the text of The Bus Stop, Chinese playwright Gao Xingjian’s play about passengers waiting for a ride that never arrives.
“I’ve got a lot of reading to get through the next couple of hours,” Kinsman said. “Ice cream and existential crisis are on the menu.”
The outlet of the popular ice cream company, founded in 1978 by two hippies named Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in a Burlington, Vermont garage, fills a long-vacant storefront on the ground floor of the former Chapel Square mall, next to the Omni Hotel and across from Lalibela, Ah-Beetz, and Pitaziki restaurants on a revived stretch of Temple Street. Manager Holly Lajoie has hired seven part-timers, from Gateway and Southern Connecticut State University and Metropolitan Business Academy, to scoop the ice cream.
Ben & Jerry’s now ups the competition for gourmet ice cream in downtown New Haven, going up against the longtime reigning local champ, Ashley’s on York Street, and a popular new Chapel Street store, Arethusa.
On the menu: vegan P.B. & cookies.
The outlet opened last Friday. The Lajoies hadn’t intended to open in winter; delays in dealing with their landlord, PMC Property Group, repeatedly pushed the opening from an original July date.
As luck would have it, high school students were staying at the Omni for a Model UN conference last weekend, and kept the place opening at the start.
Holly Lajoie.
The potential customer base of students like Kinsman helped lure Holly Lajoie and husband Dan Lajoie, her partner in the business, to locate the franchise in a storefront in downtown New Haven. The city’s Office of Economic Development helped the couple with a matching grant from a facade program to help pay for the new signs out front.
The Lajoies, who live in Wallingford, have dreamed of opening a Ben & Jerry’s outlet for 20 years. She’s a dental hygienist; he’s an electrician. They’ve run side businesses in the past, like a Moonwalk rental and a sports merchandise consignment outfit. Holly retired from her dental job after 33 years so she could manage the new ice-cream shop full time.
She spent months standing outside the then-vacant storefront, sometimes huddling in the cold by the liquor shop next door, performing foot traffic counts to present to Ben & Jerry’s to prove a market existed for the franchise.
“You have Yale University. All the beautiful restaurants. The Shubert. The new [College Street] Music Hall,” Dan Lajoie reasoned.
Why sell ice cream?
Kinsman.
“It’s a fun thing,” Lajoie responded. “People come in with a smile on their face. They want to treat themselves.”
