The best ice cream is usually the ice cream you are eating. It could be the chalky layers of vanilla and strawberry beneath the cake crumbs of a Good Humor bar. The stabilizer-filled soft serve from a fast food restaurant. The fast-melting malted chocolate krunch cone available at your local drugstore. But if you were to press me for the ice cream I most crave to melt on my tongue, it might be Bradley Ray's Strawberry Ice Cream.
I first tried Ray's ice cream at Antico Nuovo, Chad Colby's Larchmont Italian restaurant. There, he and Colby made fior di latte ice cream filled with swirling ribbons of olive oil, salt flakes, and grilled focaccia. And a strawberry ice cream that recalibrated what I thought I knew, loved, and wanted about ice cream. It had a silky, soft, luxurious texture, packed with fruit from Harry's Berries, the Oxnard farm behind the country's most sought-after strawberries.
Bradley Ray whips up a batch of strawberry ice cream for Henry's Secret Ice Cream, a pop-up operation offering weekly pint deliveries in West Hollywood.
(Jenn Harris/Los Angeles Times)
Now, Ray is behind Henry's Secret Ice Cream, a pop-up that features weekly drops of his Harry's Berries-filled strawberry ice cream and a host of other seasonal flavors from the former Hall Pass ice cream shop in West Hollywood. The flavors are published on the website and through the Instagram account every Wednesday at noon. Customers have a pickup window to pick up their pints from the store on Friday or Saturday.
Recently, strawberry ice cream made with mashed Harry's Berries, sugar, a touch of lemon juice and vanilla bean paste appeared. Ray folds in macerated strawberries to ensure maximum strawberry potential in every spoonful.
“As a kid, I loved eating Breyers with my family,” Ray says. There were little bits and that was my favorite part. Every once in a while I put small chopped strawberries in there to get a little bit of fruit texture.”
Each pint is packed with enough fruit, biscuits, gravy or croquettes to make it feel like a composed dessert. The mascarpone stracciatella is seasoned with a little dry sherry and filled with melted dark chocolate and Amarena cherries. Imagine a sophisticated and wonderfully sweet Cherry Garcia.
The Milk and Honey is a play on a dessert that Ray spent seven years making at NoMad in New York City and Los Angeles. Top an ultra-milky fior di latte ice cream with honey-oat shortbread, buckwheat honey caramel, and crumbled honey brittle.
“At NoMad, ice cream was an integral part of every dessert we made,” he says. “I grew to love him.”
The restaurant is also where Ray spent 15 to 18 hours a day making ice cream with his friend Henry Molina, the inspiration for Henry's Secret Ice Cream.
“We lost Henry to cancer in 2022 and I wanted this to be a tribute to him,” she says. “It's nice to keep his memory alive with ice cream.”
After leaving Antico, Ray began working as a private chef, but never gave up his love of making ice cream. Last summer, Ray started selling ice cream through direct messages on Instagram. He delivered the pints through the trunk of his car at a Vons parking lot in Arcadia.
If we're not having fun, what are we doing?
—Bradley Ray, founder of Henry's Secret Ice Cream
“I was just playing around to see if people would be interested in coming to pick it up,” he says.
People were interested and Ray was busy brewing 120 pints a day in his home kitchen. Last year, Lawrence Longo, the restaurateur behind Irv's Burgers, Prince Street Pizza and Bar Next Door, offered to let Ray make ice cream in the former Hall Pass space on Sunset Boulevard.
Using the West Hollywood store, his home kitchen and another ghost kitchen, Ray is able to make about 340 pints of ice cream a week. With the help of Joanne Bae, his first employee, he hopes to earn 600.
Pints of ice cream are $18, or $23 for fruity flavors like strawberry. It's a high price compared to the average grocery store pint, because Ray sources premium ingredients and seasonal fruit from the farmers' market. The cost of ingredients also means you'll prefer ice cream over sorbet, which requires a higher concentration of fruit. The price of a carton of Harry's Berries ranges from $15 to $22, depending on the variety.
Pints of Henry's Secret ice cream. The ice cream pop-up operates in West Hollywood with weekly deliveries.
(Jenn Harris/Los Angeles Times)
“As much as I'd like to sell straws, it's really hard to ask someone $34 for a pint,” Ray says. “And if you use premium products, there's really no way around it.”
For now, he plans to keep a vanilla classic for the purists and possibly the strawberry one. The other flavors will be up to your weekly whims. Maybe strawberry shortcake, cold brew coffee ice cream with salted chocolate caramel, or pistachio crunch.
The goal is to increase production with another facility and a larger team. Right now, weekly deliveries are selling out in just 23 minutes.
“I want this to grow organically and become something that I'm proud of and that Henry is proud of and that this community really likes it,” he says. “If we're not having fun, what are we doing?”
Where to get your ice cream
Henry's Secret Ice Cream, 9163 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, henryssecret.com.
