When Ian Clark set out to open Heifer and the Hen, his goal was maybe a little different from other ice cream shops.
“We wanted to be the ice cream shop that parents were dragging their kids to because [the parents] wanted a scoop of burnt honey or mint-basil dark chocolate,” Clark says.
With more than 20 rotating flavors like maple bacon, goat milk cajeta, whiskey ginger, orange blossom, and yes, burnt honey and mint-basil dark chocolate, Clark has created the perfect grown-up ice cream shop.
Now, there are also plenty of flavors to please young paletes — there’s super power vanilla, s’more and coco-vicious, too. But Clark always puts a new spin on old standards.
“Most of the flavors in there, with the exception of a couple, are inspired by hobbies and passions in my personal life,” he says. “My travels, whether it be to India, Vietnam, Curaçao, Mexico, living in Hawaii. It’s just a compilation of all sorts of things. A lot of these flavors are reflective of my life experience.”
And Clark has had a pretty cool life. He’s no stranger to the food business. In kitchens since he was 14, he went on to graduate from the New England Culinary Institute and then to cook in Maine, Hawaii and California (traveling in between) before settling in the foothills of Boulder.
Here, he’s cooked on the lines at Q’s, Jax Fish House, Rhumba and Centro Latin Kitchen. And he didn’t just cook; he got noticed.
The soft spoken and affable Clark made an appearance on The Cooking Channel’s Unique Eats and in national publications like Tasting Table and Sunset Magazine.
When he’s not busy in the kitchen, he’s at home tending to his bees, working in his garden or brewing up some beer.
His love of food knows no bounds.
So in 2012, Clark took his years of experience in kitchens and his passion for microbrews and opened BRU handbuilt ales & eats. And just this past April — on tax day, to be exact — Clark opened Heifer and the Hen, just beside BRU.
It’s a sweltering day when I visit Clark at the ice cream shop, but inside is a cool reprieve, a welcoming atmosphere I could only liken to a nouveau contemporary barn. Three wooden swings hang from fat chain links at one end of the counter. Clark tells me grown-ups clamor to sit there, and I wish there weren’t three young boys already occupying the space.
I try about eight different flavors while Clark tells me a little about each one, and I already know I’ll have trouble choosing which to write about, but I find myself pretty fascinated, for whatever reason, with the burnt honey flavor.
“The burnt honey seems to be the most talked about flavor, kind of to my surprise,” Clark tells me. “It’s not all that out there for me.”
Yeah… but it’s burnt.
That’s something Clark says he picked up from running a Mexican restaurant for eight years.
“Mexican cuisine is one of my favorite cuisines,” he says. “Instead of their food culture being taken over by the Spanish, they took Spanish ingredients and folded them into their own food culture and made it work for them. And by my opinion, Mexican food and Mexicans in general have such a deep rooted and intense food culture, more deep rooted than anything Europe has to offer — it’s thousands of years old.”
He explains how burnt garlic is a foundation flavor to much Mexican cuisine.
“They use techniques that when you are in culinary school and are trained as a classical chef are scoffed at,” Clark says. Burnt garlic is a main flavor in almost every sauce, but in French cooking you’d be chastised. So it’s cool. I take that concept of burning things to create depth of flavor as opposed to bitterness.”
The burnt honey flavor is delicate, like vanilla ice cream that’s been charred ever so slightly. There’s sweetness, but it’s more complex than the sweetness that comes from white sugar, and Clark says that’s intentional. Honey, like caramel, provides a subtle bitterness along with the sweet, which helps create balance.
It’s grown-up ice cream for sure, best enjoyed in a swing if possible.
Heifer and the Hen. 5290 Arapahoe Ave., Boulder, 720-328-3159.
