With a prime location street side at Mongoose Junction shopping center, St. John Scoops sells homemade ice cream and more from its tiny shop.
“Champagne sorbet is the number one seller,” owner Colette Rethage said.
This particular flavor, along with a long list of others, contains alcohol, a popular additive to ice creams and sorbets. The menu includes Rum Raisin studded with raisins soaked for two weeks in rum.
“You bite into it and get a little squirt of rum,” Rethage said.
She also dishes up ice cream made with guava berry rum provided by St. John resident Mary Athanase.
Alas, if you’re underage, ice creams and sorbets made with alcohol are off limits to customers under the legal drinking age of 18.
“We do card,” Rethage said.
As for the non-alcoholic flavors, the list is also long and includes the traditional vanilla and chocolate, as well as guava, honey lavender, piña colada sorbet and strawberry lemonade sorbet.
Not all flavors are available every day but Rethage said she usually has at least a dozen on the menu.
While the standard ice cream serving comes in a plastic cup, Rethage and her staff make yummy waffle cones that are worth the little bit of extra cash.
When it’s too early in the day for ice cream, stop by for a cup of Sumatran coffee or yogi green tea. St. John Scoops also serves super-food smoothies made with healthy ingredients like almond milk, flax seed, chia seed and fruit or organic supplements.
“These are really good in the morning,” she said.
While St. John Scoops opened in March, Rethage is no stranger to the ice cream business. In 2005, she opened I Scream in the small shopping area across from the V.I. National Park bulkhead, later opening a second shop at Wharfside Village. She closed those before opening St. John Scoops.
Like many island transplants, Rethage moved to St. John after visiting. In her case, it was former resident Christie Dove, whose parents owned Chilly Billy’s in the Lumberyard shopping center, that provided the link. They were roommates when the two attended Penn State University.
Rethage visited the territory a few times and, after spending the summer waitressing at Chilly Billy’s, she realized she didn’t want to go back to her home state of Pennsylvania.
Rethage said she’s met plenty of challenges along the way. Mongoose Junction has no generator so, when the power goes out, St. John Scoops has to stop selling frozen treats because opening the freezer hastens melting. She said it’s often hard to convince customers that no, they can’t buy ice cream at that exact moment because she can’t open the freezer doors.
Staffing is always a challenge, she said. “But I’ve gotten very lucky with the people I have right now,” she added.
The supply lines are sometimes problematic, and her St. Thomas suppliers don’t deliver to St. John every day. She said sometime customers want a particular flavor and she doesn’t have the ingredients to make it or it was extremely popular and her supply ran out.
Running an ice cream business wasn’t what Rethage set out to do. With bachelor’s degrees in both communications and media studies, as well as English, and a master’s degree in secondary English education, both from Penn State, she was launched on her career as a high school English teacher when she moved to St. John.
She did teach for two years at Gifft Hill School after she arrived because she missed interacting with the students and didn’t want to waste her education, but soon the ice cream business grew to the point where she couldn’t do both.
Along the way, she met Chirag Vyas, who with Kevin Chipman owns St. John Brewers and the Tap Room. She and Vyas are now engaged and planning a wedding next summer.
They like to travel and this summer visited Budapest, Vienna, Bratislava and Prague, all Eastern European cities off the usual tourist route, to celebrate her 40th birthday.
“We went because those are off the beaten path,” she said, adding that she has Czech roots so the Czech Republic capital was a must.
As for the future, she and Vyas plan to travel, perhaps to South Africa or the Galapagos for their honeymoon.
And she’ll be at the helm of St. John Scoops for the foreseeable future.
“Ice cream is my baby. I love creating new flavors and I love eating ice cream,” Rethage said.
Check out the Facebook page at www.facebook.com/stjohnscoops.
