ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to everyone who has helped us along the way, we are eternally grateful that we have been able to grow this little idea into a career we love. Here’s a brief list of family, friends, and team members who have helped make Van Leeuwen what it is today.
A bottomless thank-you to . . .
Susanne, Harvey, Robbie, Diana, and Sally O’Neill, for being OK with Laura living on the other side of the world! Your support and love is always felt.
Ellin, Louis, Jenny, John, Josh, Bruce, and Joy, the extended Van Leeuwen family, for your endless support, love, advice, fudge recipes, and shameless promotion of our ice cream!
Jane Nguyen. Thank you for putting your heart and soul into this little ice cream factory. We marvel at your drive and passion. Thank you also for assisting on the recipe development for this book.
Our ice cream production team, Robert Meldrum, Alvaro Flores, and Edison Gomez, who work tirelessly to keep our freezers full. You guys amaze us daily!
The Van Leeuwen managers, truckers, baristas, and scoopers, past and present. You’re a motley crew and we love you guys!
Chef Vinh, Chef Jason, and the Selamat Pagi team, thanks for putting up with the ice cream stampede during brunch and for providing the best “shift-drink” bar in town.
Taylor Vaught, you gracefully wear so many hats. You are a delight, and we don’t know what we’d do without you.
Kristin Vita, thanks for everything—everything! We miss you all the time!
Adrienne Winterhalter, for your friendship, number crunching, beautiful designs, and countless other things! (And for being the reigning champ of the three-cone-one-hand maneuver.)
Chelsea Wilkes, and the Van Leeuwen baking team of yesteryear, thanks for showing us what the best baked goods on earth taste like!
Sophia Loch, for all the many hats you wore and the delicious things you brought to us!
Matt McKenna, for tirelessly schlepping ice cream all over the city year-round and charming NYC’s bodegas the way you’ve always charmed us!
Jon Okon, for your larger-than-life demeanor and southern phone charm. Thanks for keeping things running at HQ.
To Jim Derway, thank you for all your support and endless knowledge. We've learned so much from you.
The Suarez family, for your support in those early days. Thanks for giving the Eagle and Bobcat a home in Connecticut and for feeding us Bonnie’s granola and other treats!
Mike Kagan, Ben Colombo, Sarah Colombo, Skye Byrne, Christian Brammar, Eddie Otoka, Tom Bouman, Amanda Hegarty, and Mike Cahil, for believing in this little idea right from the start. We couldn’t have done it without you.
Our friends and lovers, for stepping in to taste ice cream, scoop ice cream, make ice cream, carry ice cream, draw ice cream, and mostly hear us talk about ice cream for the past eight years. You’re the best.
Chris Rosi and the LA team, for pioneering our West Coast chapter.
Our beloved home of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Thanks to the community for embracing us from day one. We love our neighborhood!
And, of course, thank you to the incredible team that got behind us and helped make this book . . .
Olga Massov, what an incredible delight and alignment of the stars it has been to work together. You’ve so beautifully brought our story to life and kept us on track through the roller-coaster ride of writing our first book. We are so very grateful to you and happy that little baby Freedman was grown on Van Leeuwen ice cream!
John McElwee, Anna Stein O’Sullivan, and Jenni Ferrari-Adler, for believing in this book and getting it into the right hands!
Dan Halpern, Gabriella Doob, Libby Edelson, Suet Chong, Sara Wood, Allison Saltzman, and the wonderful team at Ecco, we are so delighted to be a part of the family! Thank you for your meticulous attention to each and every word—and for having the vision to make such a beautiful book!
Sidney Bensimon, the world’s greatest photographer, your talent, vision, and energy have made this process so memorable and special.
Thank you to Filippo Tarentini for all the magic light and amazing retouching.
To Chelsea Zimmerman, our wonderful food stylist, for creating such beautiful scoops and staying cool when the temps were soaring!
To Paola Andrea, for the gorgeous props styling.
To Jordan Colon, our dear friend, for allowing us to shoot at the beautiful EAT Greenpoint.
Special thanks to:
Helen Levi
Caitlin Mociun
Virginia Sin
Ren Yagolnitzer
Greg Yagolnitzer
Logan Polish
