Naomi Pomeroy’s dog, a smiley blond terrier mix named Leroy, greeted me the other afternoon upon entering the space that used to be the Woodsman Tavern. The windows were papered over and the chairs pushed against its dark-wood walls. I was there to meet Pomeroy and her business partner and longtime pastry chef Mika Paredes, with whom she’s opening a frozen custard scoop shop in the adjoined storefront June 14—the first dedicated location of the duo’s pandemic-born frozen custard company, Cornet. Also with them was local restaurateur Luke Dirks; Pomeroy and Dirks aren’t ready to reveal much, but eventually they plan to open a restaurant in the space together.

In the early days of Beast, Pomeroy’s former tasting menu restaurant off N Killingsworth Street, she and Paredes (they’ve been working together for close to two decades now) adapted a frozen custard recipe from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the house ice cream recipe. When Beast transformed into the market café Ripe Cooperative during the pandemic, they sold it in pints—a deliciously impractical pivot, considering they continued using farmers-market produce and making it on the stovetop, thickening the eggy custard over a double boiler before churning it in diminutive five-quart batches. “My friend told me the other day that he was gonna make a T-shirt that said, ‘Work harder not smarter,’” Pomeroy said. “Which I just think is really awesome.”

When Ripe closed in 2022, Pomeroy wrote in a public letter that it was largely due to skyrocketing food prices, and the event became an example of the near impossibility of running a fully farm-to-table restaurant in today’s economy. She and Paredes have continued producing Cornet custard in a commissary kitchen and selling it out of Pomeroy’s flower shop, Colibri, and will continue doing so as the new shop opens. At $17 per pint, it’s clear they haven’t budged on ingredients.

What makes custard custard and separates it from regular old ice cream, Paredes says, “really comes down to fat content,” and adds that “Legally, there are standards.” It’s the case that all custards are ice creams, but not all ice creams are custards. The FDA mandates that any product labeled “frozen custard” must contain at least 1.6 percent egg yolk. “And ours is like, 16?” Pomeroy asked Paredes, who confirmed.

Pomeroy and Dirks are keeping details about the future restaurant under wraps, though their collaboration in itself is certainly news. Dirks cofounded the restaurant group Submarine Hospitality in 2016 with chef Joshua MacFadden, incorporating Ava Gene’s and opening Tusk and numerous other businesses. Dirks left Submarine in 2019 and the group has since been acquired by Sortis Holdings. This will be his first hospitality project since. (Dirks is not involved in Cornet.) Restaurant aside, he and Pomeroy are happy to share plans to host a dinner series—a distinct project from the future restaurant—this summer in the shady courtyard off the building’s west end, next to the original Stumptown café, the building’s other tenant. Pomeroy will cook family-style for 30-or-so people on select nights through the summer; reservations will be available as early as June.

During Cornet’s hours of operation, Thursday through Sunday, noon to 8:30pm, the courtyard promises to fill with ecstatic kids (and adults) with custard dripping down their arms. In the new shop, they plan to continue their existing model of releasing three or four new flavors biweekly; on offer is chocolate, vanilla, and a vegan option, plus whatever’s left from the previous run.

Portland is thick with ice cream options, but none operate as artistically as this. Flavors are fleeting the way you might expect a nimble restaurant’s daily changing salads and seafood to be. Strawberries only feature in June, when at their best. They once made a sorbet of fresh guava. “We nerd out on the ingredients,” Paredes says. But she’s also more than game for nostalgic flavors and has created an endless run of high-low riffs. A tribute to Dairy Queen’s Peanut Buster parfait gets a fancy ripple of dark chocolate and Spanish peanuts roasted with sea salt and olive oil; a fresh Oregon strawberry shortcake flavor is folded with a freeze-dried strawberry cookie crumble inspired by the crust of a Good Humor bar; an Almond Joy flavor swaps imported Marcona almonds. The goal, Paredes says, is to craft something “elevated and delicious and real.”

Other than pints, they’ll offer scoops in particularly exalted cake cones sourced from Rome. They’re coated in beeswax, Pomeroy said. And Paredes added that she likes the drama they inspire in customers, saying they win an excited “Whoa!” without fail.

I asked Paredes what she hopes to accomplish with the new shop.

“Just to focus on pure joy,” she said. “Like, that’s it. There’s nothing quite like handing a child a scoop of ice cream. It’s insane. It’s, like, pure endorphins—for both of us. There’s no amount of ‘like’ buttons that you can get to experience that.”