Here’s the Scoop – Salt & Straw Open at Downtown Disney in Disneyland
I am happy to announce the much-anticipated Salt & Straw has opened at Downtown Disney in Disneyland! The ice cream shop, founded by cousins Kim and Tyler Malek, is the first location in Orange County, California.
Salt & Straw is known for using fresh, organic, and local ingredients to create its “taste-provoking” flavors. Seasonal flavors will rotate on a monthly basis and all ice cream can be served up in a waffle cone with rainbow sprinkles and hot fudge! Pints are also available for those who want to bring delicious ice cream back to their hotel or home to enjoy.
Guests who enter the new Salt & Straw at Downtown Disney will also be treated to a one-of-a-kind experience. All who visit will be greeted by knowledgeable ice cream experts who are just enthusiastic about ice cream as we are! All visitors are invited to sample their way through the scoop shop’s unique menu and share a special moment with friends and family over a few scoops.
The Malek Cousins paid close attention to every detail when designing the shop. One of the main focal points of Salt & Straw is an abstract totem pole made of stacked scoops and cones. Handmade light sculptures and red-and-white-striped exterior panels are featured to give the shop the feel of a modern-day mercantile.
Recently, Disney Parks Blog had the chance to sit down with Co-founder and Head Ice Cream Maker, Tyler Malek, to get the scoop on their new Downtown Disney location. Check out the interview below:
What makes Salt & Straw unique?
We collaborate with artisans in each of our scoop shop communities to create distinctive flavors. We team up with chefs, artists, brewers, coffeemakers, chocolatiers and charcuteriers to craft distinct and amazing offerings. This collaboration is what makes Salt & Straw truly unique. When we create these partnerships, the flavor begins to build a life of its own with a taste profile that provokes guests to ask questions and find out more about the ingredients.
For example, we are using cream from the family-owned Scott Brothers Dairy in Southern California. Each flavor is crafted with intention to tell a story about an artisanal product such as Dandelion chocolate, Sightglass Coffee and lavender from the Central Coast Lavender Farm & Apothecary in Paso Robles, California; a peak-season ingredient from a local farm or to commemorate an occasion or holiday.
You use locally-sourced foods, seasonally. Tell us more about that:
Yes! Our creative process involves seeking out the best-tasting and highest quality seasonal and local products. When we’re looking for new ingredients, we let the local farms guide us, so our creativity is directed by our surroundings. That’s a huge benefit for our research and development process because no matter what we’re serving, we’re always using the best ingredients at that given moment in time.
What are you most passionate about?
I love taking people on a journey with our ice cream and inspiring them to start thinking about the food around them from a new perspective. We like to say our ice cream is “taste-provoking,” meaning it will not only intrigue your taste buds, but it will leave you wanting to learn more about that specific ingredient or that particular social cause we’re highlighting. We get to use our ice cream almost as a “soap box” to tell stories that we feel are important. I take that very seriously and have used our ice cream to highlight important social causes like reducing food waste, resolving childhood hunger, supporting public education, and talking about basic human rights in our communities. Honestly, ice cream gives us a platform that is incredibly powerful to talk from and it’s exciting to be able to use that power for good.
This is your first scoop shop in Orange County, Calif. What does that mean to you and what can visitors look forward to?
What also makes Salt & Straw unique is that we change our offerings monthly, debuting new seasonal menus on the first Friday of each month. This is incredible because it means every time you visit, you’ll be treated to a brand-new experience based on what is seasonal and salient at that moment. So, when you visit in August, you’ll get to take a tour of Southern California’s various farms through flavors that showcase summer vegetables. Now in October, the Spooktacular series features flavors such as The Great Candycopia and Mummy’s Pumpkin Spice Potion that celebrate the Halloween season. What you get at Salt & Straw is far from a tasting experience and more like a journey through ever-changing stories about food, art and ice cream.
Salt & Scoop is just one of the several new projects and refurbishments underway for the promenade area in Downtown Disney at Disneyland. Keep it here with us at MickeyBlog for all the latest!
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Source/Image Credit: Disney Parks Blog