Soft Swerve — Spoons over Forks
Jason — Co-founder of Soft Swerve
Finally, a post about my kryptonite: ice cream! Back during my prime ice cream eating days (circa 2010), I could down a full half gallon all by myself in one sitting. Last month, I interviewed Mike and Jason — co-founders of Soft Swerve — for Welcome to Chinatown’s Business Spotlight series, and I’m super excited to share their story with all of you! I personally tried their ice cream last fall during Welcome to Chinatown’s “In the Mood for Food” block walk, and I can confidently say that, of all the ice cream I’ve had over my quarter century of life, Soft Swerve is probably in my top 3 (my other favorites are the soft serve taiyaki ice cream from SomiSomi and the super unique flavors of ice cream from Wanderlust Creamery — both of which are in Los Angeles).
Opened by two childhood friends, Soft Swerve has been serving unique, Asian-inspired ice cream flavors from its original location on Allen Street since 2016. Over the years, Soft Swerve has captured the hearts of many with their exciting flavor rotations and drool-worthy Instagram page. Read on to learn about how Mike and Jason started their business and how they have been faring during COVID.
Tell us about your business and who you are! How long have you been open? What do you sell at your store?
Hi! We are Mike and Jason, the co-founders of Soft Swerve. By the name of our store, you can probably guess that we sell ice cream! We opened our first store on Allen Street in December 2016. We started off doing soft serve ice cream, but we now offer frozen pints and sorbets as well. We’re known for our specialty, Asian-inspired flavors such as purple yam (ube), black sesame, and matcha. Everything we offer is made in house. We stick to the flavors that we know and like, and we want to make the best possible version of those flavors.
We keep 4 soft serve flavors on tap at the Chinatown store. Our rotations are usually seasonal, and we have about 4 a year. In the past year, due to COVID, we’ve strengthened our frozen / pint offerings so that people can still enjoy our ice cream at home. We now have up to 16 flavors as a frozen option.
Look at their pretty Instagram feed!
Could you please provide us with some background on yourselves? What inspired you to start your business?
Jason: Mike was the brainchild of this business.
Mike: I was a communications major in college. After graduating, I worked for 5 years at a nonprofit that provided affordable housing for the Two Bridges neighborhood in the Lower East Side. I’d known from Jason way back. We went to elementary school together at P.S. 2 on Henry Street and have been friends for about 20 years. While I was working at the nonprofit, Jason was thinking about the next chapter of this life. He was in finance and realized that finance wasn’t for him, so we flirted with the idea of starting a business together. In the beginning, we would just get drinks and spitball a bunch of ideas while hanging out.
I’ve always wanted to do something related to food. My parents worked in the restaurant industry; my dad was a Chinese immigrant and could only get restaurant jobs after coming to the U.S., so I grew up around food. The catalyst for our ice cream shop appeared on a summer’s day, while I was working at my nonprofit job. I stepped out for some ice cream because it was really hot, and I needed something to help cool me down. I was craving some Asian-flavored mochi ice cream, but I could only find large boxes of it in grocery stores. I didn’t want to have to buy a big box and eat it all by myself, so I started thinking about creating my own ice cream shop. At the time, the only ice cream shops in Chinatown were Häagen-Dazs, which is pretty upscale, and Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, which we loved but wasn’t in the area where we wanted to be.
Frozen hot chocolate
Purple yam (ube)
Fun flavor combo :)
Around the same time, Minus10 (f.k.a. 10Below), a rolled ice cream shop run by 3 of our good friends, opened in Chinatown. The business was a home run, and it made me want to start something similar. I approached Jason with this idea, and he went with it. Jason didn’t have experience in food, but he had a keen business sense from his finance background. Jason’s family also ran a successful laundromat business in the Lower East Side, so he’s been around business his whole life. For 6 to 12 months, we saved up and polished our idea before finally quitting our jobs in 2016 to formally launch our venture.
“We were facing a fork in the road, but we chose to pick up spoons. And so, as we swerved from one direction to the other, Soft Swerve was born.”
The one uncompromisable part of our business was that it had to be in Chinatown. We both grew up in Chinatown, and we wanted to make sure that we knew our audience and that we were familiar with the flavors that our customers would want. Luckily, we found a great space on Allen Street, and our ice cream was a hit! Our first few flavors -- ube, black sesame, and matcha -- were so popular that we still keep them around. Ube was meant to be a seasonal flavor, but customers love it so much that we keep it on regular rotation.
How did you learn how to make ice cream?
Jason: We had zero experience making ice cream before we started our business. It was all trial and error.
Mike: For me, food was just something that I did at home. I love to cook and experiment in my kitchen, but there was no way I could own and operate a restaurant with a full kitchen with no experience, so ice cream / dessert was a good entry point for me. As Jason said, it was all trial and error. In the beginning, we played around by buying plain vanilla ice cream from the grocery store and adding flavors to it. We also bought a Cuisinart and tried to make fresh ice cream, but that didn’t work very well for us. Eventually, we got the ingredients and the machinery right, and it got easier from there.
Who are your customers / what demographic do you cater to?
Pre-COVID, we had a wide range of customers. About a third of our customers were tourists, another third were Chinatown locals, and the rest were from the broader New York Tri-State area.
Post-COVID, the third of business that we got from tourism is completely gone. We started seeing a decrease in tourism in February, even before COVID really hit New York. Of the tourists still in New York, many of them just stopped coming to Chinatown since COVID was being branded as the “China virus” in the news. We’ve never seen Chinatown so empty before; it was like a scene out of The Walking Dead.
Fortunately, we still have a lot of locals who come support us and a lot of people in the broader NYC area that still come and make Soft Swerve a destination stop for them. The majority of our customers are young (in their 20s to 30s), as we do a lot of social media marketing through platforms like Instagram.
What are your favorite flavors that you offer? Why did you decide to make these flavors?
Mike: My original inspiration was mochi ice cream, but we ended up doing soft serve after some back and forth. There’s a Japanese grocery store in New Jersey called Mitsuwa Marketplace. Inside the food court, there is a place there called Matcha Love that has the best black sesame and matcha ice cream that we’ve ever had. My personal favorite is black sesame, and Jason’s favorite is matcha green tea. We wanted to offer both flavors in Chinatown, and they quickly became crowd favorites. These, along with ube, are the 2 flavors that we regularly have on rotation.
We’ve tinkered with the recipes a little bit over the years, changing the ratios of matcha and black sesame, and we think we’ve finally perfected them. Matcha is finicky to work with because if you add too much of it to dairy, it gives the milk great flavor but destroys the creaminess of the ice cream, and the resulting product is very dry. It also presents a supply chain challenge for us, as it’s so popular that we run out of it very quickly. We get our matcha straight from Japan, and it typically takes 6 weeks to arrive since it comes by ship and not air. It was very expensive to do all the initial research on the matcha, as we had to play around with a bunch of different types. We absolutely did not want to compromise on the quality of our ingredients. We knew that we either had to get the best matcha we could find, or we wouldn’t offer the flavor at all. We tried so many different matcha powders, but it took a long time before we got the consistency that we like.
Purple yam (ube)
Matcha and black sesame swirl
When COVID first hit NYC, what kinds of thoughts were running through your head?
Jason: I still remember the day when it first started getting serious. It was March 2nd, my mom’s birthday, and I was eating dinner with my parents. They had just confirmed the first case in New York, and we were all like, “Nah, it’s not going to spread here, it’s just in Asia.” Then, 2 weeks later, there was a lock down order. When the lockdown happened, again, we were like, “Oh it’s just going to be 2 weeks and it’ll be ok after.” Obviously, that was not the case.
We were considered an essential business, so we weren’t required to shut down, but we ended up shutting down anyways because there was a lack of business. As we approached the official lockdown date, we weren’t even making 10% what we were making last year, so we decided to close for the safety of our guests and our employees. We were shut down from mid-March to early May of 2020.
How have you been faring with the impact of COVID? What are some things that you have been doing to stay open?
We’re just trying to survive at this point. We need to hunker down and get through this until more people get vaccinated or until the stats for the city get better. We’ve been focusing a lot on hard-packed, frozen ice cream and making it available on delivery platforms, and that’s helped us even though delivery services are very expensive. Ever since COVID hit, we haven’t taken a single paycheck, and the company hasn’t been profitable since the pandemic started. We’ve asked all of our old employees to come back, so most of our pre-COVID staff are working in our stores again. As long as they are getting paid, it’s okay.
How has Welcome to Chinatown (WtC) helped your business? How are you planning on using the Longevity Fund grant?
Mike: We are incredibly grateful to still be in business and to have received so much support from Welcome to Chinatown. Even aside from the grant, the sales that WtC has driven to us have helped us stay afloat. WtC was the one who picked us up from one of our really dark places. Without WtC, we wouldn’t have even re-opened as early as May. When Vic (co-founder of WtC) reached out and told us what she was doing, she encouraged us to open our store for Feed the Frontlines, a program that’s helping feed frontline workers in NYC. That encouraged us to start running again. That summer, there were a consistent number of orders that kept coming in.
Welcome to Chinatown also helped us get some publicity by helping us promote our store. Harry (WtC’s lead designer) and his team created these really cool stickers and T-shirts for us. We both bought some because we loved the design so much!
Jason: I echo everything that Mike said. We heard about the Longevity Fund through social media and through our friends in Chinatown. We’re planning on using the grant to weather the storm and help pay for our rent and utilities. We’re not making any money right now. We’re just trying to keep the doors open and keep making ice cream.
Any advice you would like to give to other small business owners trying to survive during COVID?
We would give the same advice that we’re trying to give ourselves: there is a light at the end of the tunnel. New Yorkers are resilient. We will get through this.
What has been your greatest accomplishment or proudest moment as a business owner? What has been your biggest challenge?
Jason: My proudest moment was when we were selected as one of the Feed the Frontlines vendors. During the lockdown, there were a bunch of doctors and nurses housed in medical facilities near our store. One day, I saw that one of the nurses who was temporarily stationed there was selling their fridge, and they happened to have Soft Swerve ice cream in the fridge!
In terms of our biggest challenge, it would have to be these past few months / this year. We’ve been fighting to just get the business running again. It’s been all hands on deck.
What is one fun fact or something interesting that most people don’t know about Soft Swerve?
Mike: Our name (which is a tongue twister for a lot of people) reflects the fact that Jason and I were on different walks of life when we started our business. We once jokingly said to each other that “we were facing a fork in the road, but we chose to pick up spoons.” And so, as we swerved from one direction to the other, Soft Swerve was born.
Any plans for the future? Both amidst and beyond the pandemic?
We currently have 2 locations: Our original location on Allen Street in Chinatown and a new location in Kips Bay that opened during the pandemic. The Kips Bay location was scheduled to open in March 2020, but didn’t end up opening until May 2020 due to the pandemic. For a business owner, there are probably few things worse than opening up a new store in the middle of a pandemic. We had virtually no customers in the middle of May, which is unheard of for NYC.
Before the pandemic hit, we had plans to open more locations. We actually had a few deals on the table to work with investors to open outside of New York. However, right now, we need to focus on keeping our current locations alive. If we start diverting our attention to other places, that would be really detrimental to the two stores we currently have.
What do you hope your legacy will be? I.e., 50 years from now when people think back and remember Soft Swerve, what do you want them to remember?
We want to be remembered for our unique flavors, and we want people to think that this is some of the best ice cream they’ve ever had. We also want to be remembered for the feeling that people got whenever they walked into our stores. We hope that people will look forward to getting our ice cream every Sunday after getting dim sum or something. Our staff is trained to provide the best customer experience ever. We hope that when people are having a bad day, they can leave happier than when they came.
How can people support your business?
Right now, we know it’s a little cold and that it’s off season for ice cream. Whenever you do have an ice cream craving, just remember that Soft Swerve is still here and that we’re still open for business!
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You can also support Soft Swerve through Welcome to Chinatown’s exclusive Soft Swerve merchandise collection. Profits from sales will go directly to Soft Swerve to help alleviate the burden of added costs from COVID’s impact.
Chinatown establishments like Soft Swerve are what makes the spirit of our neighborhood. We need your support — now more than ever before — to keep that spirit alive. Please consider making a donation to our small business relief fund, The Longevity Fund, or help us spread the word of what’s at stake. Together, we can preserve Chinatown businesses and help say Chinatown will always be open for business.
Photo Credit: Fuxuan Xin, Soft Swerve’s Instagram