Nostalgia by the scoop at Marianne’s.
Before Bi-Rite Creamery’s Salted Caramel and Humphry Slocombe’s Secret Breakfast, there was Sam Lieberman and his little red ice cream shop, Marianne’s.
For many longtime visitors, the Santa Cruz confectionery has been a traditional pit stop on the way into town or the place to shake off the sand before heading home.
Sam and his wife, Dorothy, owned the shop for more than 50 years, during which they developed the neighborhood ice cream spot to constant-line-out-the-door status. While the vintage facade never changed, behind the scenes Sam created more than 250 flavors while pioneering imaginative recipes that were decades ahead of Bay Area artisanal scoop shops.
Not much has changed since Sam, a Santa Cruz native, sold the business to Kelly Dillon and Charlie Wilcox in 2012. That’s exactly the way Sam, who died the next year at 84, would have preferred things. Wilcox remembers well what Sam said to him when he approached him about buying Marianne’s: “You probably know just as much about ice cream as I did when I bought the business. All I knew was how to eat it.”
Marianne’s was opened in 1947 by Tom Becker, who named the shop for his daughters, Mary and Annie. It changed hands again before a real estate agent approached the Liebermans about going into the ice cream trade. “So we bought the store, and we had no idea about ice cream,” Dorothy says. “We started going to national ice cream conventions here, out of state, everywhere.”
Soon the couple were swapping flavors at trade shows. They sought to exchange recipes at every ice cream shop in every town wherever they traveled. The couple were pretty open-minded when it came to flavor concepts, so quite often suggestions from restaurateurs, festival organizers and customers were tested, tasted and developed for the growing menu.
Meanwhile, Dorothy was shopping the brand to local restaurants, offering to develop flavors to complement menus. Over the years, they added cardamom-pistachio, macapuno, mandarin chocolate, lychee, Mexican chocolate, horchata, cantaloupe and watermelon sorbet. (Sam also claimed to be the first to color bubble gum ice cream blue.) But no flavor is as notorious as the savory (and highly memorable) garlic ice cream, developed for San Francisco’s Stinking Rose and picked up later by Gilroy Garlic Festival organizers.
In 2011, Dillon and Wilcox had recently moved to Santa Cruz when they first visited Marianne’s. The shop was jammed, and Wilcox ordered the 50/50: orangesicle and vanilla ice cream.
Wilcox was searching real estate listings the next morning when he happened across an ad for Marianne’s. The shop had been up for sale for more than four years, but Lieberman was biding his time, waiting for the right buyer.
Less than a month later, Lieberman and Wilcox met for the first time and would spend the better part of a year working together before agreeing on a sale. “Sam and Dorothy wanted people who understood what an institution Marianne’s is in our community,” Dillon said.
“We simply let Sam and Dorothy know how we felt, openly,” she said. “We showed them a presentation of what we would do to carry on and had ‘before and after’ pictures. It was the same shot. Which is how we see it — we are stewards of a Santa Cruz classic.”
Marianne’s Ice Cream, 1020 Ocean St., Santa Cruz. Open 10 a.m.-11 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-midnight Friday and Saturday. (831) 458-1447.
The Santa Cruz confectionery has been a traditional pit stop on the way into town or the place to shake off the sand before heading home.