THE SALT & STRAW WIZ BANG BAR OPENS AT PORTLAND’S PINE STREET MARKET ON SATURDAY APRIL 16
Founders Kim and Tyler Malek open a new soft serve dessert bar with fresh spins on the childhood swirl, sundaes, novelties, and more
Salt & Straw
, the iconic Portland-based, family-run ice cream makers known for their chef-driven approach to an American classic, will open a brand new concept in Pine Street Market, Portland’s first food hall, on Saturday, April 16, 2016. The new shop is called Wiz Bang Bar and features Salt & Straw’s special versions of plated sundae desserts, soft serve, and a variety of novelties. Every item will be made from scratch in the open kitchen, from the signature soft serve to baked goods for sundaes to candies for mix-ins. A first for Salt & Straw, the Wiz Bang Bar will be a soft serve only location featuring five rotating flavors, which roll with the seasons. It will center around a 10-seat chef’s counter allowing for a peek into the creativity, care, and ingredients the Maleks hope will transform soft serve as they’ve done with ice cream over the past five years.
, the iconic Portland-based, family-run ice cream makers known for their chef-driven approach to an American classic, will open a brand new concept in Pine Street Market, Portland’s first food hall, on Saturday, April 16, 2016. The new shop is called Wiz Bang Bar and features Salt & Straw’s special versions of plated sundae desserts, soft serve, and a variety of novelties. Every item will be made from scratch in the open kitchen, from the signature soft serve to baked goods for sundaes to candies for mix-ins. A first for Salt & Straw, the Wiz Bang Bar will be a soft serve only location featuring five rotating flavors, which roll with the seasons. It will center around a 10-seat chef’s counter allowing for a peek into the creativity, care, and ingredients the Maleks hope will transform soft serve as they’ve done with ice cream over the past five years.“We’re honored to be a part of Portland’s Pine Street Market, where some of the city’s best chefs are coming together to bring new ideas to life,” says Salt & Straw Co-Founder Kim Malek. ”The spirit of the project is almost like an incubator, and we wanted to do something new, too. We hope our new soft serve dessert bar will be a real treat for everyone.”
Fusing the past with the future, the Wiz Bang Bar will offer a one-of-a-kind retro-inspired menu and window into the Salt & Straw kitchen, showcasing the chef-driven nature of the company. The menu items will be made from scratch by Head Ice Cream Maker Tyler Malek and Pastry Chef Natasha Hillendahl in the open kitchen, from the homemade candy bars and candied fruits to the grits and soft serve. Using rich and velvety flavors ranging from custard bases to tart and dreamy buttermilk bases, all of the soft serve flavors are handmade on-site using fresh, local cream from Willamette Valley’s Alpenrose Dairy and spun in a way that adds very little air making each flavor extra dense. The groundbreaking ice creamery will include a menu of novelties like the Chocolate Tacolates with ancho chile ice cream, a handmade waffle cone coated in Woodblock chocolate and topped with Bitterman’s Sel Gris and inspired toppings including revolutionary hard “magic” shells made from fresh berries, single origin chocolate and white chocolate with Oregon black truffles. The chef-ly sundae creations, the original inspiration for the Wiz Bang Bar concept, will utilize soft serve in new ways with dishes like Grits Brûlée with macerated berries, homemade crunchy berries and Vanilla Custard soft serve, and the Hot Fudge Hazelnut Ganache with angel fluff & Woodblock Chocolate Soft Serve. Wiz Bang Bar will also serve a selection of local beer, wine, and beer floats such as the Salted Caramel Stout by Breakside Brewery, featuring caramel made by Salt & Straw, and topped with Salted Sweet Cream Soft Serve.
“Our menu in this space is super nostalgic, combining inspiration from my favorite childhood memories along with some of the amazing ingredients and unique style that has made our scoop shops so incredible. I think we’re treating soft serve (and ice cream in general) in a way that’s never been done before, carefully making everything by hand, displaying the fresh and local ingredients at the bar, and creating a beautifully built space that is both innovative and inspiring,” says Salt & Straw Co-Founder and Head Ice Cream Maker Tyler Malek.
A mad genius mash-up of a retro ice cream parlor and a sushi bar chef’s counter, the Wiz Bang Bar is designed by Portland-based Osmose Design, the group behind the design of many of the Salt & Straw scoop shops. While the Salt & Straw neighborhood shops are crafted with a combination of abstract nostalgia and a celebration of textures and materials inspired by the process of ice cream making and eating, for the Wiz Bang Bar at Pine Street Market, Osmose streamlined the new functionality of the shop concept, putting the ingredients and creation on display. Precisely angled mirrors above the bar counter show the server’s handiwork as each piece is created, in the style of a cooking school or demonstration booth. The main counter is cool mint and appears to soften and melt toward guests, in inviting curves and layers. The location will boast playful elements like a walk up window on Pine Street, for people to pick up select treats on the go. The 500 square foot Wiz Bang Bar flows into the communal Pine Street Market space, a large, open area designed for gathering.
The Salt & Straw Wiz Bang Bar is located at Pine Street Market 126 SW 2nd Avenue, Portland, OR 97204 and will be open daily from 10 a.m. – 11 p.m. For more information, visit www.saltandstraw.com/
Unique Wiz Bang Bar Offerings:
Super Special Sundaes
The heart of Wiz Bang Bar! The yummiest sundaes handmade by the Wiz Bang Bar pastry team.
Hot Fudge Hazelnut Ganache with angel fluff & woodblock chocolate soft serve
Thick fudge, warm Oregon hazelnut ganache served over angel food cake filled with homemade marshmallow fluff and a heaping swirl of Woodblock Chocolate soft serve.
Fresh Berries & Grits Brûlée with crunch berries & vanilla custard
Sweet brûléed grit cake topped with Vanilla Custard, fresh seasonal berries and finished with magical homemade crunchy berries.
Peanut Butter & Jelly with PB cereal & vanilla custard
Based on the award-winning dish we created for Feast Portland’s Sandwich Invitational. Toasted bun, Oregon Marionberry jam, Vanilla Custard and topped with homemade peanut butter cereal – we’re never going back to eating regular PB&Js!
Rhubarb Sour Straws with rosé lemon curd & salted sweet cream soft serve
Rhubarb sour straws – the best invention ever! We created a sundae just to let these babies shine. We discovered the joy of candying and dehydrating strips of fresh rhubarb when creating a similar sundae for L.A. Loves Alex’s Lemonade 2015. Butter mochi, rosé lemon curd, Salted Sweet Cream soft serve, topped with the infamous rhubarb sour straws.
Ritz Pie a la mode with apples & salted sweet cream soft serve
Inspired by a walk through the Portland Farmers Market. Here, we’ve created a custard pie with both sliced apples and crushed ritz crackers inside the pie. These little pies are topped with Salted Sweet Cream soft serve and candied sliced apples.
Soft Serve Ice Cream
Our creamy dreamy soft serve is made right here in our Wiz Bang Bar kitchen with all-natural Willamette Valley cream from Alpenrose Dairy. We L-O-V-E featuring the freshest seasonal ingredients so be on the lookout for new flavors popping up!
Vanilla Custard
Classic and incredibly yummy. We’ve been perfecting our super secret combination of Tahitian, Mexican and Madagascar vanillas for the last 5 years and have finally created what we think is the perfect full-bodied vanilla flavor for this special custard.
Woodblock Chocolate
Super dense and super delish featuring handmade, Portland-made, delicious-made single-origin chocolate from our friends at Woodblock Chocolate. The hard-scooped version of this ice cream is one of the most popular flavors at our Salt & Straw scoop shops!
Salted Sweet Cream
An ice cream created to show off the purely beautiful flavor of the fresh, all-natural Willamette Valley cream we use in all of our ice creams. Enhanced with a touch Guatemalan fleur de sel from The Meadow. Try this ice cream topped with a scoop of hot caramel or fudge…in the words of head ice cream maker, Tyler, “it’s bomb.com!”
Smoked Oregon Ham
Pure smokey, molasses-y, salty fun. Try an Oregon Black Raspberry hand-dipped cone with this flavor – life will never be the same!
Roasted Strawberry Coconut
Dangerously delicious non-dairy goodness. We roast fresh strawberries with a touch of sugar. We blend the caramelized strawberries with coconut cream and voilà – total yumminess!
Hand-Dipped Cones
One of head ice cream maker, Tyler’s, absolute favorite things. When creating the Wiz Bang Bar menu, we knew we needed our version of a hand-dipped cone. We’ve meticulously dialed the perfect magic-ness of these shells by using real ingredients and flavors.
Single Origin Chocolate Shell
Woodblock Chocolate creates the perfect, thin shell over a creamy swirl of your choice of soft serve.
Black Truffle White Chocolate Shell
Freshly shaved Oregon Black Truffles steeped in melted white chocolate until the flavors marry together in seamless perfection. Only found in the PNW from November-May, Oregon Black Truffles, are far less pungent than other truffles you may have tried. We love this shell over our Woodblock Chocolate soft serve.
Oregon Black Raspberry Shell
This is the first magic shell in the world made from fresh fruits. Oregon Black Raspberries are fully intense in aromatic berry flavor and color creating the yummiest and most beautiful hand-dipped cone ever. Give this shell a try with our Smoked Oregon Ham soft serve – it is life changing!
Concretes
Soft serve blended with any of our wicked delicious handmade candies:
Salted, Malted, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
Homemade nuggs of chewy, gooey, malty, salty chocolate chip cookie dough. Pairs perfectly with our Vanilla Custard.
Homemade Cookies & Cream
Homemade oreos…what could be better?! We’ve been working on this recipe for two years now with the goal of having something perfectly crunchy, dark and chocolatey. These are waaaay good with our Salted Sweet Cream soft serve.
Hazelnut Butter Crunch Bars
We start with homemade, super thin rice krispy florentine cookies followed by thin layers of chocolate ganache between each cookie. Then, we top that built-up-rice-krispy-dream-
Novelties
Chocolate Tacolates
A nod to those satisfying choco-tacos from the past. A handmade waffle cone shell, cinnamon and ancho chili ice cream, dipped in a ton of Woodblock Chocolate, and topped with Bitterman’s Sel Gris. Nomnomnomnom.
Super Duper Bars
The future of ice cream bars is here – creamy, full fat delicious ice cream dipped in a variety of our hand-dipped shells along with any other goodies that strike our fancy!
Ice Cream Sammies
You know what the best part about ice cream sandwiches is? It’s after you’ve meticulously peeled the white paper off and eaten the ice cream, you’re left with a thick layer of fudgy cookie on all fingertips. The only solution is to gnaw that gooey, cakey, cookie-brownie-hybrid from each finger. Oh the delight! We replicated this in our sammies by folding homemade marshmallow fluff into our chocolate cookies before filling them with our Sea Salt with Caramel Ribbons ice cream. The result is a simple ice cream sandwich that looks nostalgically similar to what you used to get from the ice cream trucks, just that ours are made carefully by hand with the best ingredients in the city and the most delicious ice cream you could dream of.
Floats
A float made with any soft serve flavor and any soda of your choosing! Beer and wine too if you’re feeling more adventurous.
Shakes
Choose your own adventure in milkshake form! Any soft serve ice cream can be made into a milkshake using any of our fun homemade ingredients…hot fudge, caramel, malt, cookies & cream, cookie dough….the world is your oyster!
Sodas
Our friends at Atlas Sodaworks are serving their homemade, Portland-made sodas in bottle form for the first time….and we get to be the first shop to carry it! We’ll be featuring Spruce Cola and Birch Root Beer because they are perfect pairings with our ice cream.
Beer & Wine
We’ve been lucky enough to work with some incredible brewers and wine makers over the years and we’re now featuring a selection of favorites at Wiz Bang Bar:
Salted Caramel Stout by Breakside Brewery (featuring caramel made by Salt & Straw!) – try a beer float with our Salted Sweet Cream soft serve…yum!
Passionfruit Sour Ale by Breakside Brewery
Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir and Rosé (used in our rosé lemon curd!) by Union Wine Company
About Salt & Straw Ice Cream
Salt & Straw Ice Cream is a chef-driven ice cream kitchen with scoop shops in Portland and Los Angeles that partners with local artisans, producers and farmers to serve unusually creative and absolutely delicious ice cream. Each ice cream is handmade in small batches using only all natural cream from local farms in each city. Flavors showcase the best local, organic and sustainable ingredients from Oregon and Southern California farmers and artisans as well as imported flavors from small hand-picked farms from around the world. The company started in Portland, OR serving eight flavors from an ice cream cart in May of 2011 and now has three scoop shops in Portland and two in LA. Scoops of handmade, small batch ice creams, sundaes, milkshakes and floats as well as pints to go are available at each with an ice cream sommelier of sorts who will gladly take you through a tasting of all the flavors. Favorites, seasonal, design your own variety packs and pint club memberships are available for online purchase and can be shipped anywhere in the United States. Salt & Straw’s ice cream cart is available for catering parties and events. In April of 2016, Salt & Straw will open the Wiz Bang Bar at Pine Street Market, a soft serve dessert bar featuring a 10-seat chef’s counter and fresh spins on the childhood swirl, sundaes, novelties, and, more. Find more information at www.saltandstraw.com or call 971-271-8168. Follow us on Facebook at Salt and Straw Ice Cream, Twitter and Instagram: @SaltandStraw.
