Some of the best ice cream in San Francisco oozes out of a converted shipping container plunked on a paved lot in Hayes Valley. It’s the home of Smitten Ice Cream, which freezes cream to order and about a minute later, hands over one of the silkiest desserts that’s ever melted in your mouth.

The key to Smitten’s creaminess is the presto-freezing thanks to liquid nitrogen. The conventional way to make ice cream is to deep-freeze a churned cream mixture for several hours until it hardens.


But the longer it sits in the freezer, the more the water particles form into ice crystals and mar the creamy texture.

That’s minimized with liquid nitrogen and molecular gastronomy. Smitten’s patented machine, dubbed “Kelvin,” churns the cream mix and adds liquid nitrogen. Waiting customers love to watch the ultra-cold, odorless, tasteless liquid nitrogen spew puffs of fog as it quick-freezes the cream. It looks like a witch’s brew.

Though the Hayes Valley storefront opened only in the spring of 2011, Smitten founder Robyn Fisher had begun mulling over an ice cream enterprise five years earlier. She had a psychology degree and an MBA, but wanted to do her own thing rather than be in the corporate world.

Ice cream was a natural for Fisher, a Boston native; at the most popular ice cream shops, Bostonians form lines out the door even on snowy winter nights. Fisher first peddled her liquid nitrogen ice cream from a Radio Flyer wagon at San Francisco parks. She devised Kelvin with the help of engineers, and today the world’s four Kelvins whirr on the front counter at Smitten.

Like a few other artisan ice cream producers in San Francisco, Smitten makes everything from scratch. That includes its pizzelle cones, which are buttery and cookie-like compared to waffle cones. It offers vanilla, Tcho dark chocolate and two other ice cream flavors daily, ranging from the familiar (at least to San Francisco ice cream aficionados), like strawberry/white balsamic and salted caramel, to the surprising, like quince with nut streusel and butternut squash/candied pecan.

Smitten Ice Cream
432 Octavia St. (at Linden), San Francisco
Monday-Thursday, Sunday: 12 - 9 pm
Friday, Saturday: 12 – 10 pm