Welcome back to Good Taste, your menu for Bay Area flavors. This week, we take that mission quite literally by examining the trajectory of Secret Breakfast, the signature flavor by Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream.
420 in the Park may have been officially “cancelled,” but that doesn’t mean you can’t partake of some delicious fun.
Secret Breakfast has been the most popular flavor for the entire history of Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream, which opened in San Francisco’s Mission District in December 2008. A combo of bourbon ice cream and cornflake cookies, it’s also the flavor that Jake Godby used to woo his co-founder Sean Vahey into starting a company.
“I liquidated my 401K the next day,” Vahey admitted to Good Taste.
This week, Humphry Slocombe opened its tenth Bay Area location (The Veranda, 2045 Diamond Boulevard, #34, Concord) on March 25. Besides the original Mission spot, which remains open, and this newest one, the company also has scoop shops in the Ferry Building and Dogpatch in SF, plus locations in Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, Redwood City, Campbell, and San Mateo.
The idea of Secret Breakfast (and using cornflakes in desserts, period) has been, let’s say borrowed, by so many others that the company has to have a sense of humor about it. There’s a Sunday Morning, a Grandpa’s Breakfast, a Boozy Breakfast, and many more copycat attempts from other parlors and wholesale ice cream companies that fall short of the OG. I’ve personally tried at least five knockoffs around California and in New York City.
“That flavor belongs to the world,” Vahey said, reminding that the actual recipe is in their Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream Book (Chronicle Books, 2012). “I love seeing the names and twists that people come up with, that’s pure entertainment for me.”
Secret Breakfast has now gone up in smoke, thanks to a new collaboration with Sonoma Hills Farm, which has created a cannabis strain named after the iconic flavor. Sonoma Hills Farm founder and CEO Mike Harden says that the cross of “the real OG Kush and Grapes and Cream” will be available as single-gram pre-roll joints and four packs of slightly smaller .8 gram joints.
(In return, Humphry Slocombe has made a new flavor that’s inspired by Sonoma Hills Farm’s Pink Jesus sativa flower, a coconut base with rose, raspberry and a lavender cream caramel, available April 1). Good Taste got some early approving puffs of this new incarnation of Secret Breakfast. It definitely pairs well with its original form.
Tamara is the publisher of California Eating and the founder of the new online Music Book Club.
