For Ryan and Geri-Martha O’Hara, the husband-and-wife founders and owners of Birmingham’s Big Spoon Creamery, the timing worked out just right.

Four years ago, the O’Haras began looking around Huntsville for a spot to open their third Big Spoon ice cream shop.

In early 2020, they found just the place, but another dessert business beat them to it.

“Then, of course, a month or two later, COVID hit, and we were really grateful that we hadn’t signed that lease,” Ryan O’Hara recalls. “The next year or two was just trying to hang on and survive.”

Fast-forward to 2023, and Big Spoon Creamery is finally ready to launch in the Rocket City — in the same spot the O’Haras had their eyes on three years ago.

On June 3, Big Spoon Creamery is scheduled to open in the former Cookie Dough Magic space in downtown Huntsville’s The Avenue, a retail-and-residential development that includes almost 200 loft apartments and such restaurants as Melt, Purveyor and Oshi Poke Bowl and Sushi.

“It’s a really beautiful area,” Ryan says. “It’s in the heart of downtown Huntsville. There’s tons of great restaurants and entertainment in the area. It’s walkable to Big Spring Park and the Von Braun Center. We love it.”

The staff is already in place, he adds.

“We’ve got about a dozen team members up there — some full-time, some part-time,” he says. “We’ve got a really great team leader up there who’s going to manage the day-to-day operations for that location. So, yeah, I think we’ve got our team. We’ve just got to get them trained.”

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The Huntsville shop will be open seven days a week, and the hours will be the same as Big Spoon’s Birmingham locations — noon to 9 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays and noon to 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays.

The menu will feature a rotating selection of 12 flavors of ice cream and sorbet, and guests may choose from a scoop, double scoop, triple scoop, half-flight, flight, a waffle cone, and to-go pint containers. (Prices are available here.)

While some flavors will change depending on what’s in season, a few favorites will be available year-round.

Current flavors on the Big Spoon Creamery website include roasted strawberry shortcake, cinnamon toast crunch, Valrhona chocolate, peanut butter fudge brownie and two vegan-friendly flavors, lemon mint sorbet and coconut lime sea salt.

The menu will also include a half-dozen ice cream “sammies,” Big Scoop and Little Scoop sundaes, and a banana split.

From pop-up to storefront

The O’Haras, who met while working at Frank and Pardis Stitt’s Bottega restaurant, started selling their small-batch ice cream at a pop-up event in the driveway of their house in Bluff Park in the summer of 2014.

“It was really a lot like a lemonade stand, but with craft ice cream,” Ryan O’Hara said in a 2017 AL.com interview. “We set aside $500 for our ingredients and supplies, and we just told family and friends. We didn’t expect it to be that significant, but a ton of people ended up showing up. We sold out of ice cream. We sold over a thousand dollars’ worth of ice cream in our driveway.”

So, sooner than they expected, they left their respective jobs with the Stitt Restaurant Group — where Geri-Martha was a pastry chef and Ryan had been promoted to sous chef at Chez Fonfon — to go all-in with ice cream.

“We had this dream for an ice cream company, but it was kind of one of those one-day-down-the-road kind of dreams, way back on the back burner,” Ryan said in that 2017 interview. “Things have happened a lot faster than we anticipated.”

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In quick succession, their little start-up business grew to include first an ice-cream cart, then a food truck, and finally, a brick-and-mortar shop.

The O’Haras opened the original Big Spoon Creamery in Birmingham’s Avondale neighborhood in 2017 and their second in suburban Homewood two years later.

Now comes Huntsville.

“Huntsville is a big step for us,” Ryan says. “We love that city so much. We really can’t wait to open there. It’s gonna be fun.”

An expansion in Avondale

To coincide with their Huntsville opening, the O’Haras are also wrapping up a refresh of their original Avondale location that will double its size from about 1,400 square feet to nearly 3,000 square feet. They expect to finish that in early June.

Big Spoon Creamery makes all its ice cream for all its locations at that Avondale shop, and the expansion into the former Sons Donuts space will not only give them more room for production and storage, Ryan says, but also add more seating for their guests.

“There’ll be some banquette seating and tables and chairs on that side, so that will gain us about 15 seats, which is about double the indoor seating we currently have,” he says.

“That was always sort of the downside to that store — is that we just never really had much indoor seating. So, it’ll be really nice for us to be able to expand and get more seating for the guests.”

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For now, that’s it for Big Spoon Creamery.

The O’Haras are in no rush to expand beyond Huntsville.

“I think we would like to open some more (locations), but right now, we’re focused on just getting this one right and making this one a success,” Ryan says. “Then maybe a little ways down the road, we’ll think about what’s next.”

The Huntsville location of Big Spoon Creamery is 201 Jefferson St. North, Suite 6. The shop is scheduled to open Saturday, June 3. For more information, go here.

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