Big Gay Ice Cream Shutters in Philly, Following Closure of Original NYC Shop

The Philadelphia location of Big Gay Ice Cream has closed its doors for good, its owners announced, another casualty of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

Owners Doug Quint and Bryan Petroff made the decision to shutter the Philadelphia outpost of their iconic brand only a week after their flagship original shop in New York's East Village officially went out of business.

The Philadelphia location was the first Big Gay Ice Cream shop outside of New York. Quint and Petroff started the frozen treat brand in 2009, operating out of a truck and initially using the "Big Gay Ice Cream" name as temporary measure, recalled the Inquirer. It was a name that stuck - and an idea whose time had come.

The owners recalled at their Instagram account that "in 2011 we decided that was what we were supposed to do with our lives. We signed the lease, quit our day jobs and built ourselves a perfectly imperfect hole-in-the-wall soft-serve joint."

They served up the Philadelphia location a few years later.

"That location opened in 2015 after a few years of us doing special events in the city," the owners posted on Instagram. "We had five fun years at that location, but it too has become another COVID closure."

The owners pointed to a combination of depressed sales resulting from the pandemic and increasing rents. "As a seasonal business with no indoor seating we recognize that the location will never truly recover," they wrote. "Therefore, we have decided to call it."

"We hope to return to a new Philadelphia location," the Instagram post continued. "For now, we've put the entire shop in storage."

But the name lives on in two other New York shops, one on the Upper West Side and one in the West Village. Also, "We are continuing to work with our South Street Seaport landlord on the best strategy to reopen that location," Quint and Petroff wrote at Instagram.