Steve Lipschutz never screamed for ice cream, but nevertheless ice cream found him. After moving to the city over a decade ago to advance his career as a drummer, Lipschutz spent the last ten years quietly running Lady Moo Moo, a small ice cream window he opened with Benoit Gerin, a French pastry chef who did his time working at Central Park’s Jean-Georges and who had moved on to the gourmet wholesale ice cream supply business. It was Lipschutz’s idea to pop open up a window at Gerin’s small creamery in Brooklyn and a devoted following has since developed, deep in Bed-Stuy (“Further into the neighborhood… than most hipsters dare to tread,” as one admirer fawns in a British blog.) 

More recently, Lipschutz has had expansion on the mind and his eye landed on an empty cafe in Bushwick, which had been rapidly unoccupied a few months ago, adjoining Irving Square Park.

“As far as location, foot traffic, proximity to a park, but it’s also in a community that we align with,” Lipschutz told me by phone about Lady Moo Moo’s latest expansion plans. He’s already started renting out the place and has set a “lofty goal” of opening a second Lady Moo Moo there by late October. Perhaps November. 

He’ll be taking over a converted garage that comes with some recent local history. The spot had been converted first, five years ago, by Venn, an Israeli real estate tech developer. The company built it out in a deal with Lennar, the second largest home construction company in the country, as part of a larger project of “building and scaling neighborhood participation-based platforms, products and experiences.” Venn was also co-founded and run by Or Bokobza, an IDF reserves officer who immediately reported to serve in Israeli’s ongoing invasion of Gaza and has since publicly aligned the company with the country’s goals in the war. In Bushwick, the backlash was swift. A public boycott (“Boycott Genocial Irving”) followed and Bokobza’s business was, quite literally, run out of town. 

“The community uprising led them to leave and default on their lease,” Lipschutz recalls. The sheriff would repossess the property, where the coffee machines were still sitting, abandoned. Lipschutz signed the newly available lease shortly after. “I have definitely gotten wind of what their whole position is with what’s going on in the Middle East and we definitely don’t agree with that,” says Lipschutz. “It seems like our whole mission is the opposite of their’s, which is refreshing.”

When Lipschutz moved to the city from Massachusetts, he had been drumming in clubs in the Lower East Side, primarily in a small punk outfit called The Hog. They would eventually put out an album. To pay the rent, he also started manning a Wafels & Dinges cart, among the first to join the small empire of baked Belgian street food that briefly took over Manhattan for a few years. Eventually, he took over as the brand’s general manager, which was where he met Gerin, then W&D’s ice cream purveyor.    

“Who wouldn’t want to be friends with their ice cream supplier?…I eventually quit my job, sold my shares in [Wafels & Dinges] and, the very next day, ran into Benoit at a red light. And he said, ‘Steve, I’d like some help developing my wholesale business a little more.’” Now, Lipschutz was an ice cream man. Lady Moo Moo opened shortly after. (Amid the pandemic, Benoit would eventually leave the New York ice cream business for Miami, Lipschutz says. These days the ice cream at Lady Moo Moo is being made primarily by Miguel Ramos, a chef who had been working for Benoit and Lipschutz since 2016. ) Despite only being open on summer weekends, Lady Moo Moo has become an institution in Brooklyn, regularly topping a local bank’s poll for the most populous borough’s most popular ice cream.

“We are proud to employ many people from the neighborhood at the scoop shop,” Lipschutz wrote me in an email. “Some of whom have been visiting the shop since they were children and have now become old enough to work here.”

Some, like Lipschutz himself, are working artists too. He still remembers the first person he hired to scoop ice cream at the window: Matt Wood, an actor who would go on to perform as an understudy for Mr. Crabs in “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical” and, more recently, impersonated John Belushi in last year’s Saturday Night. Others, like Mehdi Bouabid, who runs the outfit’s wholesale operation, “worked his way up through the NYC restaurant system” since high school, Lipschutz says.

The opening in Bushwick will give Lady Moo Moo’s fans the novel opportunity to buy his ice cream all year long, not just on hot summer weekends. A phrase Lipschutz likes to use to describe how he wants his new ice cream parlor to feel is “safe space.” He plans to throw a “job fair” next month at the new location to find new hires.

“It’s interesting. I know that there’s been some push to quote-unquote gentrify the neighborhood and we’re not for that,” he says. For instance, no coffee. In fact, Lipschutz already sold the coffee machines abandoned in Bokobza’s company’s bid to flee the place.  

“Everyone that has seen us starting to do the build-out keeps asking if we’re going to do coffee. The answer is that we’re not going to do coffee because we want to leave room for all the coffee shops that are already there. I think you’d agree: there are enough coffee shops in New York City. And we don’t know coffee, we’re ice cream specialists. It doesn’t make sense to do it,” Lipschutz says. 

No coffee at Lady Moo Moo. Just ice cream, milkshakes and, he promises, candy too. He’s also hoping to rent out part of the space to food pop-ups, a popular thing in the restaurant development ecosystem in nearby Bed-Stuy. By Lipschutz’s estimation, he gives out about 4,000-5,000 scoops a year to “local community organizations.” Last month, he tells me, he was doing some of this himself, handing out ice creams at “Bushwick Family Day,” a street fair that takes place every year by the park. He liked being a part of it. 

“I do love how the neighborhood has maintained its ability to support the people who have lived there for their entire lives. So, I’m happy for them.” 

Lady Moo Moo’s is set to open in Bushwick at 1210 Halsey Street. Keep up with the store on Instagram for more details.

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Top photo taken by Andrew Karpan.