Mile End Ice Cream Favourite Adds A Surprise Second Location Out East

It’s finally warm outside, and here’s some bonus good news to throw on the pile: Mile End ice cream pros Kem Coba have opened up a second outlet in the East End.

The new location is in the far east of the Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough — it’s in the Tétreaultville sector, a little past Honoré-Beaugrand, the final station on the metro’s green line. Given that Tétraultville is perhaps less of a tourist destination than Mile End, it seems that Kem Coba 2.0 will be a little more neighbourhood oriented, and perhaps draw some more modest line-ups.

The original Kem Coba location on Fairmount (right next to the bagel store) is known for drawing extensive line-ups (although they move fast), to such a point that an anonymous Twitter account was created to track the number of people waiting for ice cream.

Founded in 2010, Kem Coba is the brainchild of one couple, Ngoc Phan and Vincent Beck — Phan is an ITHQ-trained pastry chef who cut her teeth at the now-defunct pastry chain Gascogne, while Beck is a pastry chef-turned-interior designer from France, who has since returned to desserts. Over seven seasons in business, Kem Coba has become arguably Montreal’s most iconic ice creamery, known for extremely photogenic soft serve cones (with regularly changing flavours, often combined into one two-tone swirl), and by-the-scoop ice cream flavours from salted butter, to a range of interesting fruit flavours that have included soursop, pandan, lychee, and hibiscus.

Meanwhile, for those eagerly awaiting the seasonal return of the original Kem Coba and who don’t have time to trek to the end of the green line, it will reopen this Friday (April 27).

STATUS — Kem Coba 2.0 is open at 2525 des Ormeaux.

• Kem Coba [Facebook]
• The Kem CoBa Ice Cream Line Twitter Account Is Here and It’s Hilarious [EMTL]