2. Noa
NOA
It’s four-thirty a.m. and I’m dangling upside down from my Thinking Rod, eyes darting fiendishly around my inverted spice rack, when inspiration finally strikes. Basil. Saffron. Bingo .
The rusty pull-up bar came pre-installed in the doorframe of my cramped East Hollywood kitchen, the remnant of a former tenant who probably figured out Muscle Beach was too far in traffic for a daily commute.
Despite carrying around nature’s own kettlebells on my chest, my upper body strength is nothing to write home about, so for years I just used the bar as a spare towel rack.
Until one night, very stoned, I realized I had enough strength to flip myself up and around to hang from the bar with my legs.
Sometimes you need to stare down your ingredients from a new angle to get the recipe juices flowing.
If that seems highly unusual, I don’t care to hear it.
I live alone and it is my flying-spaghetti-monster-given right to monkey around my apartment as I please. It’s called being an adult.
I right myself, muttering calculations aloud as I swipe jars and sieves and scales out of crammed cupboards.
“Milk fat at 14%… no, 15%. Balance the acidity of the freeze-dried mango…” I unload my overfull arms so I can scribble in my trusty pocket notepad.
Experience has taught me that my mind, academic brilliance aside, cannot hold even the most important information for much longer than an Italian ice can survive a hot summer sidewalk.
The daily life of one Dr. Noa Hart, PhD (Ice Cream Sciences), is a carefully crafted Hansel and Gretel trail of sticky notes, phone alerts, and mnemonic breadcrumbs sprinkled across various checkpoints to keep me on track.
The palest glint of sunrise through my bay window rudely taps me on the shoulder to remind me that I am, at this moment, very much not on track.
I really shouldn’t be awake right now, but a car alarm jolted me out of my slumber.
Before I could count a single sheep, my brain bolted out of the gate, obsessively trying to crack the code of my latest frozen concoction.
Not that there’s some urgent deadline for perfecting my mango crunch gelato with the ideal acidic bite.
Come nine a.m., my ice cream engineering prowess belongs to my boss-slash-mentor, Stella Wexler, the legendary Chief Flavor Officer of Jen they’re the wives who’ve been steering this company since it was an ice cream cart in Seattle.
Those two badasses have never taken advice from anyone but each other, and for good reason.
Their independent spirit seeps into practically every inch of headquarters, from the mismatched diner mugs at the coffee bar to the tie-dye beanbag chairs that dot the space–remnants of a well-intentioned office chair purge that did not last. Sunlight floods through floor-to-ceiling windows, highlighting shelves crammed with dog-eared cookbooks and vintage dairy ephemera.
The walls tell the founders’ story in photographs: Jen and Mary at countless protests, arms linked, faces electric with purpose.
Jen and Mary licking ice cream cones in front of their first truck, with Scoop the Revolution emblazoned on the side.
Jen and Mary offering free scoops to petitioners during the AIDS epidemic.
Like sweet-toothed Zeligs, the duo have seemingly been present, waffle cones in hand, at every major civil rights event of the last sixty years.
Peppered amongst these jubilant moments are their collection of mugshots, each one featuring their signature defiant smirks.
But it’s the massive painting above the communal snack area that best captures their particular blend of conviction and whimsy: an anthropomorphized ice cream cone, cherry-covered fist raised in resistance, crowned with a take on Woody Guthrie’s famous quote: THIS ICE CREAM FIGHTS FASCISTS.
“It’s aspirational,” Jen likes to say with a wink, before Mary chimes in, “I’m pretty sure the only thing our ice cream has fought is a few New Year’s resolutions. ”
I stride through the corporate living room toward an innocuous oak door.
Remember when I said that Jen and Mary’s independent spirit seeped into practically every inch of headquarters?
Welcome to the BFI. Not to be confused with the FBI, this is the Bureau of Flavor Investigation–although Stella, not normally punny, once tipsily referred to it as the Brain Freeze Institute, which stuck–and it is a stark contrast in aesthetic and temperature to the cozy kitsch of the rest of headquarters.
As I descend the stairs into the basement, the scent of caramelized sugar and vanilla bean is the only welcoming aspect of the otherwise sterile corporate laboratory.
Fluorescent lights hum softly overhead, casting a clinical glow over rows of industrial freezers, steel worktables, and neatly labeled jars of extracts and emulsifiers.
At the far end of the room sits my workstation, cluttered with tasting spoons, a logbook filled with my scribbles, and a melted pint from yesterday’s trial batch. Oops .
Standing ramrod-straight between me and my workstation is Stella herself, scrutinizing five test tubes of some ambiguous, glossy red liquid. Her signature black bob skims an uncannily clean line exactly one inch above the collar of her pristine white lab coat.
Stella has been my boss for three years now, including the summer I spent as her Flavor Fellow fresh out of grad school.
On paper, there’s ample evidence that she values me–believes in me, even.
I wouldn’t be here otherwise. But she also happens to be about as warm as an Excel spreadsheet, and just as compartmentalized.
In three years, the most intimate thing she has ever said to me was I hope you get to celebrate , a parting remark as she left me alone in the BFI late at night to finish an emulsification on my 30th birthday.
“Noa.” She greets me without looking up.
“Stella!” I chirp back. Our vibes couldn’t be more different, but I’ve never been one to dampen my sparkle to blend in. To her credit, Stella has never once suggested I should.
I unpack my latest creation from Aiden’s crocheted pint holder and set it down beside the test tubes she’s studying so intently.
“Maraschino cherry ribbons,” she states. “If none of these five iterations cool at the target rate, I am going to scream like a banshee.”
Stella expresses her emotions exclusively through hyperbole, in monotone, and thankfully never through action. I have never heard her raise her voice a single decibel, but she often describes, in great detail, what she would do if she were the type.
“Maybe a watched cherry ribbon never… cools?” I offer. “What are these for again?”
I watch in horror as my boss attempts a bizarre impersonation, puffing up her cheeks and letting her jaw hang open before exclaiming in a terrible French accent, “Zees ees not blood! Zees ees m-m-maraschino cherries!”
Oh no no no. Just the mention of the b-word has me lightheaded, gripping the table’s edge. Stella’s face rearranges into normalcy and now she’s taking in my woozy expression with concern.
“Not actual bl–not that,” she assures me, knowing intimately my phobia of said scarlet substance.
Two Halloweens ago, we designed a signature ice cream for the Broadway premiere of Dracula.
Despite my desperate pitch for garlic gelato, Stella decided to pursue a more…
crimson creation. After one brainstorming session, I was relegated to taste-testing charcoal varieties in the other room due to the massive hematoma I received from a head-to-table collision.
“It’s a reference. Midnight Live ?” she tries again.
I stare blankly.
“’The Time-Traveling Dentist?’ ”
I shake my head.
“Noa, I know you didn’t have the most traditional upbringing but that is some rock you’re still living under.”
Stella may not get deep and personal with me, but I’m a yapper to my core, so she knows a lot more about me than I do about her.
Including the fact that my hippie-dippie family didn’t have TV when I was growing up, which admittedly carried over into my adult life.
It’s not a moral stance, just what’s normal to me.
But I have a feeling this may have some bearing on my career, which I do care about, so I ask, “What does the orthodontic Doctor Who have to do with us?”
“Well, technically King Louis. It’s our next collaboration.
I’m pitching her tomorrow.” Stella handles all of Jen & Mary’s celebrity pitches, a process I’m frankly relieved not to engage in.
I prefer the power I wield in my own domain, the lab, to navigating big personalities and putting on airs of servitude.
“You’re pitching King Louis? And he’s a she?” I ask, confused as ever.
“Don’t worry about it.” Stella rubs her temples. “I’m certain maraschino cherry ribbons are the answer, but if I can’t get them to cool down I’m going to–”
“Scream like a banshee, right.” I nudge the steel pint I brought toward her. “Palate cleanser?”
Stella sighs, tearing her gaze away from the test tubes. She pulls a tasting spoon from her lab coat, unscrews the lid, and dips in with the expert precision of a jeweler inspecting a gem.
“Hm.” Her eyes go distant, the telltale sign that she’s sifting through the vast flavor archive in her brain, cross-referencing each note against a lifetime of taste. “It’s… good.”
I should know better than to take that initial approval at face value, but because it’s me, and I am a hopeless optimist, I prod. “Good as in pitchable-to-Jen-and-Mary good?”
Stella tucks a runaway lock of black hair behind her ear. “Good as in, you always want to reinvent the wheel, but the wheel doesn’t always want to be reinvented.”
“And the metaphorical wheel is… ice cream?”
Stella looks at me like I just asked to confirm that 1+1=2. “The wheel is wheel-shaped for a reason.”
Now it’s my turn to sigh.
Stella considers my orange concoction. “It’s got a nice textural contrast. The basil is confidently incorporated.”
But.
“We can be the brand that pushes boundaries with flavor, or we can be the brand that pushes boundaries in the world. But we can’t do both–not at the same time.”
“I know we’ve had this discussion before, but just because we’re good at what we do doesn’t mean we couldn’t expand and be good at that, too!” I protest, but she’s already locked into her defense.
“Sticking to classic but delicious ice cream gives Jen and Mary the foundation to drive real social change. When we veer into the experimental, we risk losing consumer trust. People come to us because they know we won’t pull a Salt & Straw on them.
” Stella levels me with a look. “Noa, the last time I was at their flagship in Portland, I ate pig’s…
b-word… ice cream. Solely because I refused to let those hipster sellouts see me sweat. ”
In one fell swoop, I’ve gone from trying to defend the boldness of my mango confection to devoting 100% of my mental energy to not picturing porcine parfaits.
“Anything I can do that’s not… cherry-related?” I ask weakly.
Stella beams. “You’re on candy tooth duty!”
My lucky day.