Big Spoon Creamery – Homewood

Big Spoon Creamery’s Homewood shop sits at 927 Oxmoor Road in Homewood, Alabama, one of three storefronts the small batch ice cream company has opened since its earliest days as a driveway experiment. Ryan and Geri-Martha O’Hara, who met while working under chef Frank Stitt in Birmingham, married in 2014 and started making ice cream at home not long after. What began as a personal project turned into a pop up, then a truck that traveled around Birmingham, before the O’Haras opened their first permanent storefront in Avondale in 2017. Homewood followed in 2019, and a third shop opened in Huntsville in 2023.

The Homewood location keeps the same approach that built the brand’s following in Avondale. Flavors change with the seasons and lean on ingredients from local farmers and artisans rather than a fixed year round lineup, so a summer visit and a winter visit can look almost nothing alike. Beyond scoops, the menu includes ice cream sammies, milkshakes, sundaes, and splits, giving visitors a few different ways to work through whatever is on the board that week.

The company has been outspoken about wanting the business to be about more than the product. Ryan and Geri-Martha have said they wanted to build a company that cared about making good ice cream but cared more about the people behind the counter and the community around it, a philosophy that shows up in how the shop treats regulars and staff alike. That mission has carried through as the business grew from a single trike to three brick and mortar locations across three cities.

Homewood’s shop is open seven days a week, with Sunday through Thursday hours from noon to nine at night and Friday and Saturday stretching an hour later, from noon until ten. The Oxmoor Road location puts it within easy reach of the other food and drink businesses that have filled in around it in recent years, making it an easy stop after dinner at one of the nearby restaurants or a stand alone destination on its own.

What separates Big Spoon from a typical scoop shop is the seasonal discipline behind the flavor board. Rather than defaulting to the same dozen flavors year round, the kitchen treats the menu the way a restaurant treats a seasonal menu, built around what is actually available rather than what is easiest to keep in stock. For a suburb that already had ice cream options before Big Spoon arrived in 2019, that seasonal approach gave Homewood something genuinely different, and the shop has held its place on Oxmoor Road ever since.

The path from a home kitchen to three storefronts took patience, and the O’Haras have been candid about starting small, first with a trike that could only serve a handful of customers at a time, then a truck that let them cover more ground around Birmingham before committing to a lease. That gradual build gave the couple time to refine recipes and figure out what a permanent shop actually needed to look like, rather than opening a storefront on day one and working backward. By the time Homewood got its shop in 2019, the brand already had two years of Avondale foot traffic behind it, which meant the Oxmoor Road location opened with a built in following rather than starting from zero.

The shop’s connection to chef Frank Stitt’s kitchens also shows up in how seriously the ice cream is treated as a craft product rather than a quick treat. Ingredients get sourced with the same intent a restaurant kitchen might apply to a seasonal entree, and the flavor rotation reflects an awareness of what farmers markets and local purveyors have on hand at any given point in the year. That level of care is part of why Big Spoon built a following well beyond Avondale, and why the Homewood shop continues to draw a steady stream of regulars alongside newcomers exploring Oxmoor Road for the first time.