When Crepe & Spoon's lease runs out this fall, the Minneapolis ice cream shop and creperie will close its doors for the last time. And owner Michael Beachy says that, after announcing the imminent closure on Instagram, some folks have been really bummed: "I had to stop a couple of Instagram conversations, unfortunately, because people would come into my DMs and be like, 'What do we have to do? We're gonna figure this out. Don't panic.'"
The Northeast shop at 339 22nd Ave. NE opened in late 2017 with vegan and dairy options but went fully vegan about a year later, switching to dairy-free ice cream add-ons, cutting the few non-vegan flavors they offered initially, and transitioning to vegan crepes (both sweet and savory, with meats and cheeses from The Herbivorous Butcher). And the move was a hit with the plant-based set, in large part because there's really no other vegan ice cream shop in town.
But behind the scenes, things were a little tumultuous. Beachy started the shop with a few friends, who left about a year and a half in "as we kind of discovered that the finances of the thing were never gonna be quite what we had hoped," he chuckles.
He managed to dig the shop out of debt, "and I almost came close to making it work a couple of times," he adds, "but those were kind of crazy years." This winter, he says, has been "just terrible."
The shop will close October 1, giving fans plenty of time to visit one (or 10) more times between now and the shut-down. After that? Beachy's getting out of the vegan eats game entirely, moving into a new career as an animator. (He recently worked on a pilot for a cartoon called Buzzkill based on the video game Killer Queen, which you can watch here if you're curious.)
Beachy understands that folks grew rather attached to the little shop. "I grew attached to it; it was a really tough decision," he says. "The cries of the people held me there for quite a while." But while he's bummed people aren't going to get to enjoy Crepe & Spoon's vegan ice cream anymore, he's confident that leaving during a boom time for vegan dining means they'll have plenty of other options—maybe even another vegan ice cream shop, one of these days.
"I hesitate to say this, but if you take a step back and look at any midsize city in the United States, you're not going to have half the amazing vegan businesses that we have," he says. "I think we're doing really well."
