It’s been a long year for, well, everyone, but equally so for Warren and Rose Schwartz. The chef duo had been planning to open a third location of their hit soft serve shop Magpies in Highland Park in early 2020, before the pandemic showed up and delayed the process by nearly a year. Now Magpies is ready to start serving on York, with opening hours beginning on Monday.
Part of the problem with opening earlier this year, Schwartz tells Eater, was the logistics of the much larger space. While the retail area that customers see will be roughly the same size as the original Silver Lake shop, the cooking space in the back has more than doubled. That means more output for this Eastside location as well as for Silver Lake and for the Tarazana outpost, since the team will be batch-cooking at this new address — but it also means more logistics, and more problems to solve.
“It was kind of one thing after the other,” says Warren Schwartz by phone when describing Magpie’s opening setbacks. Not only did supply lines slow down, so did the work, but it’s all made for a more structured finished product that he says will make the business much more efficient. Plus: more soft serve ice cream pies.
The new space is ”going to allow us to grow in the future, but really it’s for the pies,” Schwartz says. “We never thought we’d do so many pies! It’s become such a big part of what we do.”
Now, with a crush of Thanksgiving orders around the corner, Schwartz says they’re ready to roll. The shop will also feature an expanded lineup of ice creams — ten rotating flavors in all — that run the spectrum from vegan to dairy to somewhere in between, using non-vegan toppings like honey and certain sugars as a dairy-free base. There will also be quart-sized double-pints available to go, with toppings, and Schwartz says the shop may even be able to help the company get back into local delivery again.
The new Highland Park location of Magpies Softserve opens Monday at 5049 York, and will keep daily hours moving forward from noon to 10 p.m.