INTERVIEW CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE

Winemaker Michael Palmer and his chef/wife Eva Ein had a major decision to make in 2012. Their house recently burned to the ground, and instead of rebuilding, they took a risk and purchased McConnell’s Fine Ice Creams, a Santa Barbara institution that dates to 1949. Palmer still works with wine, and even plans to release Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from Mail Road in October, but he now devotes the bulk of his time to McConnell’s, a dairy, ice cream and dessert concept that recently expanded to downtown L.A.’s Grand Central Market. On July 17, I met Palmer at their GCM stall, and he shared several insights.

JL: What are your top selling flavors, and why do you think that’s the case?

MP: I don’t believe in focus groups, so I have no idea why certain flavors are more successful than others. I suspect that vanilla is going to be successful because it goes with so many things, or at least people believe it goes with so many things. That being said, our top flavors are certainly the one we won best dessert in America with, the Double Peanut Butter Chip. We have a very unique version of salted caramel with our 56-year partner Guittard Chocolate, using a very unique chip process. It’s not like anyone else’s salted caramel chip. It’s much rummier…Our Sweet Cream is legendary, because that’s our pure base. You can’t hide flaws with that…Then our Eureka Lemon & Marionberries, where we got Willamette Valley marionberries. We make preserves at the dairy and weave them into Santa Barbara lemon ice cream. That’s become a huge seller immediately. The new Olive Oil & Salted Almonds has blown up. We’ve had an olive oil ice cream for awhile. We got these Arbequina olives, a Spanish cultivar, very fruit forward, from an orchard north of Santa Barbara, and got the almonds from very close to that and roasted them. It’s a great Central Coast story, but you’ll notice that when I say these stories, they’re intertwined with making great flavors, not just making great news.

JL: Who gets input when it comes to flavors that you serve?

MP: We are very, very democratic when it comes to flavors, from the very beginning. I’ve worked in companies that are extremely hierarchical. I always said to myself, if I ever had the chance to do something – who knew that it would be ice cream – we would not work that way. We get around the table, everyone in the company – and when I say everyone, I’m talking about six people – and we start shooting out ideas. We’re all food people and we’re really trying to build a culture of food without ever being pretentious. We sit around there, with different tastes. Then Eva goes off, without talking about which ones she really likes, takes our input and starts throwing things at the wall. Our development process is a little bit longer than some because that’s the way she works. She’s her own little lab, her own little kitchen. In not-so-short order, she’ll bring ideas and we’ll develop them over the course of a couple months. We don’t just throw things into a batch freezer and churn out samples. There’s a lot of thought that goes into every one. We try not to just develop flavor after flavor.

JL: How do decide what goes on the menu, other than ice cream?

MP: McConnell’s is a dessert concept, as much as it is a dairy and an ice cream company. The flagship store on State Street has a full bakery, and we have a full-time pastry chef, Jordan Thomas. Eva is a savory chef. Eva doesn’t even eat dessert, to be honest, barely eats ice cream, which is what I think gives her this talent to make this product. They get together. Ice cream is the foundation for this concept, so what really goes with it? It’s all farmers market driven, so Jordan will find a particular berry she likes and make pies or muffins or a certain cookie. Already, certain things she’s made over the last 10 months, since we opened our store, certain ones have already achieved a small degree of fame. They’ve already become staples. It’s the same process as developing the ice cream. What really goes well with it? We try to do savory, we try to do some sweet, but what rounds out the offerings when ice cream’s the foundation?

JL: What does expanding to Los Angeles allow you to do as a company?

MP: McConnell’s has been on the Central Coast for almost 70 years, and it’s been this secret. Foodies have always known about it, and ice cream aficionados have always known about it, but it’s also a small town, up there. The great thing is we have access to incredible ingredients, and it is an incredible product, but it’s really like this baby that’s been gestating for 70 years. We knew when we started up, just under two years ago, we saw this explosion in the artisan ice cream world. It’s almost like there’s a nuclear proliferation happening in ice cream right now. Not to be overblown, but we want to show people the mama bear of artisan ice creams, the thing that started it all. So many of these companies market and market and market their product, but at the end of the day, the product has to stand up and be something very special. We’ve always known it is, because many people are doing something interesting, but McConnell’s is a unique product and we want to share it with people. Certainly we want to grow it too, as a brand, but we don’t want to be a global brand. That’s not the goal. The goal is to be the finest ice cream in the world. We want to show people that. Palates are changing, the same way they changed with wine in the Napa Valley, forty-something years ago, and coffee in the last 15 or so years. It’s happening the same way with ice cream too. People can taste things like stabilizers and burnt things that shouldn’t have any place in ice cream. We’ve never used stabilizers. Because we’re so dense, we don’t need anything to hold our ice cream together. It’s the cleanest product in the business. People taste that and gain an appreciation for it. We want to share that.

JL: Why start at Grand Central Market?

MP: We were trying to figure out, if we want to step into our backyard, Los Angeles, how do we want to do it? Do we want to start with a freestanding store? We looked at a lot of different areas of Los Angeles, because this plan has been going for about a year now. When the opportunity for Grand Central came up, it fulfilled so many of the parameters in the back of my head for where we wanted to be, for a first step outside of Santa Barbara. It’s contained, in a way. It’s certainly not a baby step, but it’s contained in that we’re part of a movement that’s happening in downtown L.A. Downtown L.A. is becoming like the center of the universe for food right now. I think that will continue. We are a food company. In that way, we’re complementary to things that are happening. Then Grand Central in particular, it’s got such roots. It’s so legitimate with its history and how intertwined it is with the history of this city. I used to come down here as a boy with my grandfather. You can’t lie about the texture that this place contains, and the history this place contains. You see the explosion of public markets and these sorts of spaces, that have multiple vendors, throughout the United States, over the past several years. Some of them are incredibly well executed. Some of them less so, but you can’t replace something that has 100 years behind it. There is such care being put into curating the new businesses and brands that are coming into Grand Central, and also retaining the ones that helped make Grand Central special, these incredible businesses that have been around for decades and decades…For lack of a better word, it’s a comfortable way to enter into the L.A. market, to have people just walk by and try us. We’re tickled to be here.