On Oct. 6, 1999, Pete and Mike Mitchell cut the ribbon on the first Mitchell’s Ice Cream shop in Westlake. What started as the brothers’ crazy idea over dinner turned into an even crazier concept, spawning 35 staple and rotating ice cream flavors across nine Northeast Ohio locations, in addition to a permanent place on local grocery store shelves. After 25 years, co-founder Pete Mitchell shares with Cleveland Magazine what his and Mike’s leap of faith has meant to them.
I was 27; Mike was 22. During his senior year in college, he came out to visit me. I lived in Seattle. He was telling me what he was going to do after he was done with school. He had no idea.
We were out to dinner. The conversation morphed into, ‘If ever we wanted to have a small business, what could we do?’ It was not meant to be in any way a serious conversation; just filling the time, just banter. Then after dinner, [Mike] said, ‘Let's go get ice cream. Is there a good place?’ Then, as an extension of our conversation over dinner, he said ‘We could open an ice cream shop in Seattle.’
It was just an utterance, again, not in any sort of contemplative way. Then, when we talked in the weeks after that, somehow we went back to that comment and started to actually kind of think about it.
We even looked briefly for a possible location for an ice cream shop in Seattle. But, you know, we grew up in University Heights; our family, our friends were in Cleveland. We realized Seattle felt very far from home. So we shifted our attention, spent some time looking around and eventually found what became our first shop in Westlake. This is just where we're most happy.
(Courtesy Mitchell's Ice Cream)
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We were fortunate to be included in an article in The Plain Dealer at that time. We were on the cover of the food section, a picture of Mike and me. I think it was a big color picture and goofy-looking, but people saw it. And immediately after that we felt busier.
My brother started learning on his own about how you make ice cream: ingredients, equipment and processes. I mostly work with the people that work in the shops. There's things he's good at that I'm not, and there's things I'm good at that he's not. We both love that we're able to do this with each other.
(Courtesy Mitchell's Ice Cream)
There's no family history of making food or having a small business. You don't have to have extensive culinary training to have ideas about what might be a great ice cream flavor. Many people in our lives contribute to ideas. [Mike] is always thinking about modifications or ways that something could be better, if we can find an ingredient source or partner from nearby. So they're never completely done, the recipes.
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We've always had the same dream: to enjoy what we're doing, to feel like it was a positive thing in people's lives, to be able to make a living. We've never had the ambition of getting bigger; we just want to be part of the fabric of the Cleveland community. We've been in our kitchen on West 25th Street now for a little over ten years. This is where we hope to make ice cream for decades to come.
We focus on the work that we have control over. I think having an approach that shows appreciation for people is, for us, a huge thing. It adds a nice dimension to work, and it's rewarding to work with people that you have a relationship with.
(Christian Phillips)
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