A Cool Creamery Comes to Rockaway Beach
Pastry Chef Tracy Obolsky is back to making ice cream.
I’m a beach person. This means I like the feel of the warm sun, I like to swim in the salty water, and dig my toes into the warm sand. I like the sounds of the beach – the caw of the gulls, the rhythmic shush of the waves, and the chorus of children laughing or bawling depending on which part of the day you’re at. I love to sit on a chair, or a blanket in the sand, and read and doze. I like to drink cold beer, and I also like an ice cream cone.
So last week when the temperatures climbed into the 80s, I packed the kids into the car, and we escaped to The Rockaway Hotel for an overnight. The Rockaway Hotel, if you have not been, is an oasis. It is my happy place. Lovely people, gorgeous pool, a serene spa, fantastic cocktails, great food, and it’s just a couple of blocks from the beach boardwalk where I like to run and sit in the sun, and where you can do all the beachy things you love to do. I don’t surf but if you do, really it’s a must.
The kids and I spent the day in the pool, and by evening were tired and a little sunburned and tucked into bed with a movie when I realized I had not had my ice cream. So the kids paused the movie, and I ran across the street to Coastal, a frozen yogurt shop that usually has some hard ice cream too, nothing terrific, but it would do.
When I walked inside, there was a long line and a pretty new sign up that said Rockaway Beach Creamery. On the board were flavors like Vanilla Honeycomb, Salted Whiskey Caramel, Mint Fudge, Chocolate Malt, and Coffee Toffee. This looked promising. So, I waited and waited. Finally, it was my turn. I tasted a few flavors—the mint, the salted caramel, and the vanilla honeycomb and each one was better than the one before. Could I get a triple decker cone? I mean I suppose I could have, but I did not. I went with a single: the Vanilla Honeycomb, a cold and creamy scoop of vanilla with a little honey-comb brittle swirled inside.
In between spoonfuls, I mumbled that the ice cream was delicious and the guy behind the counter said, “Well the woman who makes it is right there if you want to meet her.” I did.
The ice cream genius is Tracy Obolsky, and you may know her name because she was quite a well-regarded New York City pastry chef (Esca, General Greene, North End Grill). She’s also the owner of The Rockaway Beach Bakery, a local favorite for hand-laminated croissants, sugar-dusted Croissant Loaf and Ham and Cheese Everything Croissants. The night I strolled into Coastal happened to be the opening night of Rockaway Beach Creamery, a new partnership between Tracy and Sam Friedman, the new owner of Coastal Frozen Yogurt who also owns MUD non dairy frozen desserts.
Tracy began her career in ice cream: she worked for Nick Morgenstern at Borough Food & Drink, where he taught her to make ice cream. Tracy followed Nick from project to project as his number two, and helped him open the General Greene and launch the ice cream concept that would become Morgenstern’s.
From there she worked for Dave Pasternack as his executive pastry chef at Esca, where she ran the entire pastry program, a role she stayed in for four years. In 2015, she moved out to the Rockaways and began working with the late Floyd Cardoz at North End Grill. While her pastry programs always included traditional cakes, tarts, cookies, and the like, her love of ice cream never faltered; she always made some outrageous sundae and had a list of quirky flavors.
In 2017, a friend out at the beach, Whitney Aycock, owner of Whit’s End Pizza, asked her if she wanted to open a bakery in the Marina with him – she could do pastries in the morning and in the evenings he would do burgers and fish sandwiches from whatever the fisherman caught.
Tracy was feeling burnt out by the commute and the hours of the business, and went to look at the space, which turned out to be a rather run down shack. She was unsure of what to do. But after a blizzard left her stranded in the city, she called Whit and told him she was in. She quit her job and was ready to open a bakery. But Whit had neglected to mention there was no running water in the shack. Details, details.
Tracy was undeterred. She dug a 3 x5 foot hole herself for a septic tank (the plumbers came and said it needed to be deeper so she kept digging), then she purchased a hot water tank. Also, she knew she could not use gas, so she purchased an electric oven, but when she went to plug it in, the grid blew a fuse. She realized the only way to turn the oven on was to turn off the power to the entire marina. So the oven stayed in the box, and Tracy began prepping and laminating the croissants at the shack, often in a bikini top with a Coors Light, and proofing them (waking in the middle of the night to move them to the fridge) and baking them off in her apartment. The work was exhausting, but the fisherman started buying the croissants, and she was selling out every morning. Word quickly spread of a “Secret Bakery” in the marina. Then the surfers started showing up. She sold out every day.
When the summer turned to fall, and the cold crept in, the fisherman asked Tracy what she was going to do when they pulled the boats out of the water and shut off the water supply. Tracy was confused. “I had no idea and they turned the water off!” she said. So she closed up shop and started baking at Riis Park for a bit with Whit, but when it got too cold she had to come up with a Plan B. Or is it Plan C at this point? Unclear.
Anyway, one evening she went into her local beer shop and was chatting with the owner, Phil, about the cocktail bar that was supposed to open up next door, and he said they had backed out. Phil asked Tracy if she might be interested. She was. She saw the space, loved it and then things moved quickly. She got some money together, signed a lease and opened the brick and mortar Rockaway Beach Bakery in March of 2017. “I had no money,” she said. “I painted the walls with my friends, we made the tables, I had a friend make the counter, my brother hung the FRP panels, I did the DOB permits myself.”
Six years later, through floods, bracing winters, and COVID, Tracy has remained, baking every morning, laminating butter-laden sheets of croissant dough, baking fluffy biscuits for breakfast sammies, and savory focaccia for lunchtime sandwiches, building a loyal local following from a family of Rockaway Beach residents and beyond. (If you like Apt 4F, please go have her croissants and the croissant loaf asap!).
But there was a part of her that wanted to get back to ice cream. “My first job as a teenager was at Carvel, and my grandmother was an ice cream taster at Welsh Farms in New Jersey as a child, so there is a connection there,” she told me. “When I first moved out here and started doing croissants, people were like, ‘Tracy, why are you not doing ice cream!; But honestly, I was so sick of ice cream. I wanted to get better at other things.”
Last year, a local newspaper wrote a story about the bakery, where Tracy mentioned she loved making ice cream. Sam Friedman, who had just purchased Coastal Frozen Yogurt, wanted to make local ice cream and stopped in at the bakery one day and introduced himself. “He came in and said, ‘What if we make ice cream together?’ After about a year of testing and tasting, they served their first cones last week, like kismet, on the night I walked in.
“It’s nice to be able to do ice cream again,” Tracy told me. “But I am slightly terrified as to what my summer will be like.” I really can’t blame her. Once you taste her ice cream, you will want to eat lots of it. Triple deckers even. See you in line.
The Rockaway Beach Creamery is located at Coastal Frozen Yogurt, across the street from the Rockaway Hotel at 108-19 Rockaway Beach Drive, (718) 474-0700.
What Tracy failed to tell you as a teenager she made pickle juice ice pops and made her two younger brother taste them. We should have known then ice cream making was in her blood. Written by her favorite Aunt Mary
Great piece, Andrea!! Can’t wait to go out there!!