Ice cream makers who have tried their hand at vegan flavors know there are many ways for it to go wrong. A scoop of plant-based ice cream can crumble like sediment. A tub of it can ice over like a pond. Dig your spoon into it and it can get as mushy as mashed potatoes.
It’s no wonder many ice cream shops offer dairy-free customers juice-based sorbets and call it a day. But when made with a creamy milk alternative, paired with the right ingredients and workshopped (sometimes for years), plant-based ice creams can be surprisingly delicious — a bit lighter than their cow’s milk counterparts, yet just as sweet and satisfying.
To get there, though, is no small feat. Of the ice cream makers around the D.C. area crafting flavors without animal products, many have a personal investment in the cause: a mother with a lactose-intolerant daughter; two music industry insiders who have been vegetarian since their teens; and a lifelong D.C. resident looking to unite her community of different generations — and dietary restrictions.
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These six D.C.-area ice cream shops have mastered the delicate art of the dairy-free.
Ice Cream Jubilee
Victoria Lai likens creating ice cream without dairy to seeking sunshine without heat. But at Ice Cream Jubilee, it doesn’t seem so impossible. Her shop offers a rich chocolate peanut butter made with a coconut milk base, as well as a vegan, juice-based passion fruit guava sorbet. A corporate lawyer turned ice cream maker, Lai is a student of frozen treats just as she was once a student of the law — she even attended the famous ice cream course at Penn State. Her nondairy flavors, she says, focus not on disguising but thoughtfully complementing their vegan source of creaminess. Other plant-based flavors that have made appearances in the shop include key lime pandan pie timed to the Lunar New Year and a summery toasted horchata.
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In true attorney style, Lai refers to all her vegan flavors as “sorbets” — even those made with an alternative milk base — citing an official, government definition that mandates “ice cream” be made of 10 percent dairy milk fat. “It’s just a little technicality, but it is Washington D.C. so people sometimes find that wonkiness interesting,” she says, laughing — that textbook technicality doesn’t make her plant-based desserts any less tasty.
301 Water St. SE; 1407 T St. NW; 4238 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, Va. icecreamjubilee.com. $5.45-$7.45.
Here's the Scoop
Housed in the basement level of a row home on Georgia Avenue near Howard University, Here’s the Scoop has the cozy vibe of eating ice cream on your grandmother’s porch but enough vegan flavors to rival a full-scale ice cream parlor.
The Black-owned shop sources its half-dozen vegan flavors from two creameries in Baltimore. Also Black-owned, Cajou Creamery makes exclusively vegan ice cream. Founded by husband-and-wife duo Dwight Campbell and Nicole Foster with their lactose-intolerant children in mind, Cajou specializes in globally influenced flavors: a pistachio-coconut baklava and a smooth, smoky cardamom kulfi. Taharka Brothers offers more typical flavors — “Chocolate Love” boasts a dairy-like decadence. After years of tasting regular ice creams and being desensitized to their allure, owner Karin Sellers says the vegan ice cream is now her go-to. “It still just gives me that wow factor.”
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The Pleasant Plains location has passed through her family for 45 years, operating as a laundromat and then as a hair salon. When Sellers opened her shop in 2019, she wanted to bring the neighborhood together — ice cream was just the vehicle. “Providing service to people and connecting with people … honestly, it’s just who I am,” she says. “I never feel like I’m working.”
2824 Georgia Ave. NW. heresthescoopdc.com. $6.50-$8.50.
Mount Desert Island Ice Cream
Brian Lowit and Melissa Quinley have been experimenting with plant-based diets since before it was cool. The co-owners of the D.C. location of Maine’s Mount Desert Island Ice Cream cut out meat in high school, and now they’re serving creative plant-based flavors alongside regular ice cream at their Mount Pleasant Shop. “Our goal with vegan options isn’t following market trends or anything like that,” Lowit says. “It’s important to us personally.”
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Lowit and Quinley also work in the music industry and occasionally make flavors for bands performing in town. For the Swedish hardcore band Refused, they crafted a vegan rocky road that was so involved it took days to make and so good it sold out in just hours.
At the shop, you’ll find a few different vegan flavors that rotate regularly. Made of ground-up Cap’n Crunch, their vegan cereal milk has a lightly sweet taste and that perfectly soft texture cereal gets when you’re halfway through the bowl. Their complex and aromatic kulfi flavor (which contains honey) is almost savory, and has raw ingredients you can see — pistachios and saffron.
Share this articleShareSometime in the next month, vegan grasshopper pie, an oat milk-based mint chocolate flavor, will make an appearance. And if you don’t vibe with the flavors on the day you visit, they also keep a vegan peanut butter ice cream sandwich on the menu.
3110 Mount Pleasant St. NW. mdiic.com. $5.95-$10.
Sarah's Handmade Ice Cream
Sarah Park started making ice cream to keep her daughter Annie away from the preservative-packed offerings at Baskin Robbins. Years later, when Annie became sensitive to dairy, Sarah was at it again: crafting her own cashew, pistachio and hemp milk bases for vegan ice cream in an ongoing lab experiment at their Maryland home.
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There have been many vegan flavors over the years — green tea matcha, coconut vanilla — so many concoctions Annie can’t keep track of what went into the ice cream store and what never left their living room.
At Sarah’s two Montgomery County shops — the first she opened as a retirement “hobby” — they serve vegan double chocolate chip oat milk, which has a deep richness, akin to eating brownie batter, and vegan mint chip, a refreshing, cleansing treat. She’s workshopping a piña colada flavor for the fall.
“You can tell that she’s been working on these vegan ice creams,” says Annie, noting that it’s difficult to get the consistency right. “It comes down to practice.”
10219 Old Georgetown Rd., Bethesda, and 5241 River Rd., Bethesda. sarahshandmadeicecream.com. $3.99-7.99.
Little Sesame
Middle Eastern-inspired fast casual restaurant Little Sesame is all about “celebrating plants” and creating climate-friendly foods, says Nick Wiseman, a co-founder and chef. Their plant-based ice creams offer a breezy complement to their signature flavorful, filling hummus bowls.
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But the soft serves are also distinct and worthy of seeking out on their own. With the dark chocolate Turkish coffee flavor, Wiseman says he and his collaborator Ronen Tenne had a very specific experience in mind. “You stir [Turkish coffee] and you get that rich sludge. The bottom is the sugar plus the coffee,” he says. “It’s a nostalgic taste for people who grew up drinking Turkish coffee and we wanted to replicate that.”
Along with the coffee flavor, they serve a nutty vanilla tahini flavor, and a swirl that combines them. Both flavors are oat milk based, which Wiseman describes as the most neutral of alternative milks.
“With soft serve you’re just chasing lightness and creaminess,” Wiseman says, and in comparison to dairy soft serve, he says, most people wouldn’t know the difference.
What does stand out is their unique topping bar — sweet, shredded halvah and crisp sesame crumble that give the smooth ice cream an unexpected, salty crunch.
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1828 L St. NW and 736 Sixth St. NW. eatlittlesesame.com. $5.50.
Jeni's
Jeni Britton Bauer says her vegan ice cream finally came together when she stopped trying to imitate “ice cream.” The founder of the nationwide chain Jeni’s had been playing with vegan recipes since 2014 and had a breakthrough in 2017. “It’s simply impossible to ask ingredients that are not milk to act like milk, no matter how much innovation you dream up,” she wrote in an email. “The moment we gave up trying to mimic the flavor and texture of dairy, and instead focused on creating a truly enjoyable frozen dessert, is the moment our recipe clicked.”
Its vegan flavors, made with coconut oil, came to stores in 2019. The shop — which has six locations in the DMV — has two regular plant-based products: a subtly caffeinated cold brew coffee flavor and an indulgent, fudge-filled Texas sheetcake. It also rotates out a third, seasonal flavor. This summer, it’s a delightfully tart, lip-puckering lemon bar and in September, it will debut vegan banana cream pudding.
Multiple locations in D.C., Maryland and Virginia. jenis.com.
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