Cow Tipping Creamery's East Dallas Ice Cream Shop is Closing

We'll spare you the oft-used 2016 dumpster fire metaphor, but it's never been more apt: Cow Tipping Creamery, the Austin artisanal soft-serve company that opened a Dallas outpost in March, is closing that East Dallas shop by New Year's Eve.

Jay Jerrier, owner of Cane Rosso and Zoli's, bought the Austin company with plans to expand it from its humble beginnings as a food truck. "They had an amazing product and incredible passion but needed help to take their business to the next level," Jerrier said back in February. "Surprisingly, I decided I just wasn’t getting fat enough from eating Neapolitan and NY-style pizza, so we decided that ice cream was the only way for me to push maximum density."

Jerrier and his team, including head of media and marketing, Jeff Amador, opened the East Dallas location inside Good 2 Go Taco after Cultivar left the shared space to move across the street. They also retired the Austin food truck (temporarily) and opened a Cow Tipping Creamery location inside the new Austin location of Cane Rosso this summer. But the East Dallas location just wasn't ideal.

"We always knew that the 'pop-up' shop inside of Good 2 Go Taco was not going to be a permanent location for us," Amador says. "When the space opened up as a result of Cultivar Coffee moving across the street in early 2016, we saw it is a quick and easy, 'plug and play' way to get Cow Tipping Creamery introduced to a new market here in Dallas."

Plug and play is right — Amador and Jerrier opened Cow Tipping Creamery in just four weeks after Cultivar moved out and into Goodfriend Package, "which was pretty insane," Amador says. "We learned a lot, very fast."

Dallas lost their minds over CTC's "artisan soft serve" that featured accoutrements like caramelized bananas, honey dust and brown sugar hot fudge. "In the end, however, sharing the space is just not ideal for our operation," Amador says. Business also slowed down considerably during the cold-weather months, Amador says, which made it seem like a good idea to regroup before launching new CTC locations.

And thus, CTC will close by New Year's Eve, when their lease is up, "but we are fully preparing to be done well before then, as soon as we sell out of ice cream, Luscher's-style," Amador says. "Our last day will really depend on how large the expected flood of customers proves to be. If our Instagram comments are to be believed, there are thousands of people that 'have been meaning to try CTC,' but still have not made the journey to East Dallas, so this weekend could be nuts."

Before you set fire to your Christmas tree and riot in the streets over the loss of bubble cones, know that this is not the end of Cow Tipping Creamery in Dallas, "but we are taking the opportunity to focus on the next iteration(s)," Amador says.

"We have the original Cow Tipping Creamery food truck (where the business started from in Austin) currently stationed next to our Cane Rosso location in Carrollton," Amador says. "We will be spending the next few weeks getting that truck ready to be operational."

Once the food truck is ready, it will park at the new Monkey King Noodle Company location in Carrollton and keep what Amador calls "winter hours" for the immediate future — "mostly weekends or when the weather is nice," he says. But that's not all.

"We are also moving forward with opening a Cow Tipping Creamery next door to the next Cane Rosso location at The Star facility in Frisco," Amador says. "We are still waiting on getting the keys to our building at The Star so that we can start our own construction, but we hope to open in early summer 2017."

The Cane Rosso/CTC/Zoli's team is still open to the possibility of finding a new home for the ice cream shop in Dallas proper, Amador says, "but if it is another shared space situation, it will just have to be in a much more visible and accessible spot than Good 2 Go Taco has proven to be," he says.

So there you have it — commence to feverishly inhaling ice cream this weekend as you bid farewell to this iteration of Cow Tipping Creamery, which we awarded Best Icy Treat Shop in this year's Best of Dallas Awards.

"It has been a very tough latter half of the year for our restaurants, that's for sure," Amador says. "It is a shame to see some of our restaurant friends going through (and losing to) the same struggles. We still believe in this thing and hope to see it work out better in 2017."

The ice cream shop will be open noon to 10 p.m. today and Saturday, which is Christmas Eve. They will be closed Sunday for Christmas. After that, it's all about what's left in stock — once it's gone, it's gone.

Cow Tipping Creamery, 1146 Peavy Road