USA Today profiles a small but growing niche in the restaurant world:
If the summer of 2013 is remembered for anything, it may be the hazy summer when the ice cream business went up in smoke.
That's smoke, as in liquid nitrogen — the cold-as-heck steamy stuff used by a sudden spurt of ice cream parlors to make and instantly freeze ice cream right in front the eyes of gawking customers. Folks are often amazed to watch the wave of steam that rises when the super-cold, liquid nitrogen gas hits the liquid ice cream base — and the almost instantaneous freezing of the liquid into a solid.
It might never get as big as the frozen yogurt craze or as popular as the mix-in mania of recent years, but the $10 billion ice cream industry has its frigid eyes on a handful-and-a-half of entrepreneurs who have recently opened several dozen liquid nitrogen ice cream eateries from Los Angeles to Boston.
"This is the next thing in ice cream," says Darryl David, an ice cream consultant, who advises entrepreneurial businesses. "It's a totally different way to attract consumers." ...
On a much smaller scale, there's Smitten Ice Cream, which was launched atop a Radio Flyer wagon in the streets of San Francisco in 2009. Today, Smitten has one San Francisco storefront, with two more set to open later this year, says owner Robyn Sue Fisher, a self-professed ice cream fanatic.
Smitten's best-seller: Fresh Mint Chip "because we use fresh spearmint (not an extract) and local dark chocolate," says Fisher.