The Bent Spoon in Princeton, NJ

Gabrielle Carbone, Co-owner

Origins

This is our 21st year. My partner, Matt Errico, and I both have degrees in other things. I have special education and psychology and he has history and education. I also went to pastry school. We both just loved ice cream so much and we knew that we wanted to do our own business. A bunch of things kind of fell into place and we wound up doing this ice cream shop in downtown Princeton, really close to the university. We’ve been very busy and, and we’ve made more than 725 different kinds of ice cream flavors, so it’s been really fun.

Company Mission

It’s an interesting question, because there were different periods in modern ice cream shops that were kind of pastry-chef driven. Shops focused on shock value. What kind of crazy flavor can you make? That kind of thing. We’ve made so many wild flavors, but it’s never been because of shock value. It’s more to show just how versatile and amazing ice cream can be and we can showcase seasonality and wonderful farms from The Garden State. Like, if we had placed our ice cream shop in Maine, the ice creams would taste different than what we have in New Jersey.

Signature Products

This time of year (late June), we’re just coming off organic strawberry season in New Jersey. So we only do strawberry ice cream in strawberry season, although we can some of them, and we save some to use for Valentine’s Day. We offer 22 to 24 flavors a day, and whether it’s local strawberries, local blueberries, local peaches or local corn, we try to stay local, fresh and seasonal. In the fall, New Jersey is still growing wonderful things, so we’ll have organic squash or sweet potato with spices and herbs. There are two great orchards where we get all of our local apples. Then at Christmas we do a Christmas tree ice cream. We work with this Christmas tree farm from across the border in Pennsylvania right over the bridge from where I live. We’ll get a Norwegian spruce or a Douglas fir. We make an ice cream out of the Christmas tree and it’s supposed to taste like Christmas smells.

We also make what we call a peppermint shtick. I had to make my own candy canes when we first opened because they didn’t really have naturally colored candy canes. Now I’m able to buy an organic naturally-colored candy cane and we use organic beets that we save from the season to color it pink. We make our own marshmallows out of local honey that we use in hot chocolate.

We opened in 2004 and there were cicadas everywhere the first week that we were open, the first week or two. Matt and I are both really interested in food security and sustainability and using invasive species. We do a lot of invasive species ice cream stuff, too, just to kind of show people that you can eat, eat so many different kinds of things. We couldn’t do it that first year in 2004 because we had only been open two weeks and it was funny some of the customers didn’t even know what a gelato case was. But 17 years later, we made cicada ice cream. We had already made ice cream with oysters, with asparagus. And so by the time that we did the cicada ice cream, people were so excited to try it that we had a line of 100 people waiting when we opened the door and we sold out. It was a wonderful experience for Matt and me because we were looking at it not from a shock value standpoint, but from a sustainability point of view. Different insects can be a great source of protein around the world. Like it’s a really renewable, wonderful source. Matt and I went out with nets and we got them from a man who farmed them on his property, and then I used this very long process to make them into a protein powder. Instead of going the crunchy route, I made them into a protein powder and made that into a cicada chocolate that we chopped up for chips. It wound up being a delicious high-protein chocolate chip ice cream.

The stuff we do tends to have a connection or a story or something that’s really important to us and it’s not like we’ll put bubble gum and hot sauce just to shock you.

Equipment ‘Must-Haves’

Three things come immediately to mind: a Sharpie marker I use every day of my life, so I can label everything; our big giant immersion blender that’s like three feet long and goes all day long; and the other is a refractometer that’s especially helpful for me when I’m making different kinds of sorbets, because it tells me what how much sugar is in something.

Production Tip

Be aware of economy of scale. When we get to corn season, we don’t buy like a dozen years of corn; we get two bushels of corn and do them all at once. You don’t want to peel 33 things of corn and then have to go back and peel three more corn. Or think of cherry season, which does not last that long. We’ll make them into cherry jam or like a cherries and syrup kind of thing for Sundays. We also make the cherries to put in like a cherry vanilla ice cream. So if we want to have cherry season for a while, then we just get a lot of cherries when the season comes around and start working on them. We preserve them in different ways either by freezing them or preserving them in a syrup and then we’ll sometimes do a Shirley Temple soda for a couple of weeks. We try to preserve when the getting is good.

Secrets Of Success

Matt and I work very hard and work together so well. Then there’s that bit of magic. Some people call it luck; some people call it serendipity; some people call it synchronicity, but, you know, it’s just all the things kind of falling into place in just the right way. You have to have all those pieces.

Future Plans

There’s growth in the sense of opening a million stores. We serve a lot of restaurants as well. We have our very small retail store where we serve like 1000 people on a Saturday. A lot of people come from Princeton University, because that’s really close to us. Every year we try to be more sustainable. We have metal taster spoons now instead of the plastic ones. We use compostable cups instead of paper cups. Every year we try to do something like not wasting the tops when we’re doing strawberries. We’re never bored trying to offer a more sustainable product.

For more info, visit www.instagram.com/thebentspoon

(This article appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)