Clockwise from top: The Dairy Bar’s original counter; an ad for “The Velvet Kind” from a 1925 issue of the Richmond News Leader; Easley’s Ice Cream Parlors, circa 1907
Would you try oyster ice cream? Guests at Mary Randolph’s Cary Street boarding house had the chance — a recipe for this delicacy appears in her 1824 cookbook, “The Virginia House-wife,” with instructions to “make a rich soup, strain it from the oysters, and freeze.”
While oyster ice cream might sound right at home in the 2026 food landscape alongside filthy martinis and tinned fish, for those of us with simpler tastes, Randolph also offers recipes for strawberry, chocolate, coffee and the ever-popular vanilla. References to ice cream in American cookery appear throughout the Colonial era, but vanilla’s popularity is credited to Thomas Jefferson.
Richmonders in the 19th century could enjoy French vanilla alongside other flavors at “the Real French Fancy Store” or at one of downtown’s “neat and tastefully arranged Ice Cream Saloons” owned by the Corsica-born Pizzini brothers, according to Richmond Whig. Confectioneries like these also sold imported fruits, candies, cakes and oysters. Andrew Pizinni’s saloon on Broad Street, opposite Swan Tavern, and his brother Juan’s spot, near the Exchange Bank on Main Street, became popular social spaces.
The fall of Richmond in April 1865 closed many businesses, including confectioneries, but city dwellers did not forget the delights of Pizzini’s ice cream. When he announced his reopening that September in a commercial bulletin, the proprietor proclaimed “balls, parties, etc. will be furnished in my old and usual style, which is too well known to need any explanation.”
A recipe for oyster ice cream in “The Virginia House-wife”
When many restaurants were male-only spaces, ice cream saloons were especially popular with women. “The softer sex,” noted an 1887 article in Evening Truth, “is supposed to have an inordinate partiality for ice cream.” Another woman, explaining her marriage to a divorce lawyer, reportedly said, “I never cared much for him. I married him because he kept an ice cream parlor.”
Saloons are typically associated with alcohol, but most ice cream saloons were temperate, wholesome establishments where ladies and gentlemen — as an ad for Andrew Pizzini’s spot described — “are drawn in by … agreeable, but innocent temptations.” L.C. Blount’s ice cream saloon, however, was more sordid. In 1915, Blount was “charged with operating a disorderly house” on 15th Street. The women employed there claimed to be waitresses. After arresting two white men and two Black women, the police chief stated he had seen Black “women ‘mixing up’” with white men at the place, which was sufficient proof to him that the place was “disorderly.”
The raid on Blount’s (and its associated racism) is a stark reminder of how deeply segregated Richmond was. Meanwhile, in Jackson Ward, Black-owned businesses thrived and Black Richmonders enjoyed ice cream at Easley’s Ice Cream Parlors (615 N. Second St.), and “milk shakes, limeades, nectars, phosphates, mineral waters,” and “ice cream in every style and flavor,” at Winston’s (537 Brook Ave.).
The Alexandria Gazette wrote of a frosty frenzy in an 1852 issue.
The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair brought us the ice cream cone — almost called, as the Richmond Evening News reported, the “cornucopia ice cream sandwich.” There are many origin stories, but Doumar’s in Norfolk is often credited with the invention, and you can still get a hand-rolled cone there today.
By the 1920s, industrialization brought more commercialization, introducing brands such as The Velvet Kind from Richmond’s Purity Ice Cream Company and Southern Dairies’ Sealtest.
“To ‘stretch’ your Sealtest Ice Cream in these days of wartime shortages,” a Southern Dairies ad helpfully suggested during World War II, “serve it on cake.” Advertisements promoted ice cream as health food, with one from the Dairy Council calling it “delicious, nutritious, easily digested” and full of “proteins, vitamins and minerals.” Ice cream, they asserted, “deserves a more prominent place in the daily diet.” In 1946, Curles Neck Dairy opened The Dairy Bar in Scott’s Addition, which operated until 2022.
In midcentury Richmond, local chains, including High’s Ice Cream, thrived alongside national ones, such as Howard Johnson’s and Baskin-Robbins. A 1974 Richmond Mercury feature stated, “The ice cream parlor is still with us, though for the most part they are by the side of busy highways or in ultra-modern shopping centers.” The piece mentioned the West Broad Street outpost of Baskin-Robbins, which closed in early 2026 after more than 50 years in business. “All of Richmond is changing,” owner Ralph Youngs told the Richmond Times-Dispatch at the time.
Today, neighborhood ice cream parlors — and creative flavors — are thriving. Last year brought basil and tomato ice cream from Scoop and both Duke’s Mayo ice cream and tomato-watermelon sorbet from Ruby Scoops. Will this summer see the return of oyster ice cream? We hope not, but we’d probably give it a whirl.
