Big Spoon Creamery

Big Spoon Creamery’s Avondale shop, in Birmingham, Alabama, started far smaller than the business it has become. Founders Ryan and Geri-Martha O’Hara met while working under James Beard Award-winning chef Frank Stitt, married in April 2014, and three months later launched Big Spoon as a pop-up in their own driveway. What began as a weekend experiment moved next to an ice cream cart, then a truck, before the couple opened their first permanent storefront in Birmingham’s Avondale neighborhood in 2017.

That storefront, at 4000 3rd Avenue South, remains the flagship location, and it anchors a business that has since expanded to Homewood and, in 2023, Huntsville. The ice cream itself is handcrafted, with a stated emphasis on local and seasonal ingredients, and the back-of-house team, led by Geri-Martha, develops rotating flavors rather than sticking to a fixed, unchanging menu. Ryan focuses on the operations and hospitality side, a division of labor that traces back to their shared restaurant background under Stitt, where both learned the kind of hands-on attention to ingredients that now shapes Big Spoon’s small-batch approach.

Big Spoon describes its mission as twofold: making high-quality ice cream while using the business as a vehicle to positively impact the surrounding community. That community focus shows up through an active charitable giving program supporting local organizations, alongside more conventional offerings like catering for private events and gift cards for regular customers. The commitment to local and seasonal sourcing means the flavor case looks different depending on the time of year, giving Avondale regulars a reason to stop back in as the seasons change rather than expecting the exact same case every visit.

The Avondale shop keeps evening hours later than many dessert stops in the city, open from noon to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. That schedule makes it as much a post-dinner destination as an afternoon treat stop, fitting naturally into an evening spent walking around Avondale’s cluster of restaurants and bars.

Because Big Spoon has grown from a single Avondale pop-up into a three-city operation while staying independently owned by its founders, it stands as one of the more visible examples of Birmingham’s small food businesses scaling without losing local ownership. The shop remains a family business at its core, with Ryan and Geri-Martha still directly involved in both the flavor development and day-to-day hospitality that built the original driveway pop-up’s following.

For visitors, the Avondale flagship remains the place to see where the story started, sitting a short walk from other neighborhood spots like Punch Love Coffee, in a stretch of the city, at 4000 3rd Avenue South, that has become known for exactly this kind of independent food business. Anyone calling ahead can reach the shop at 205-703-4712 to ask about catering or private event options before stopping by in person.

Big Spoon is listed as both locally owned and family owned, and the Avondale storefront also offers takeout for anyone who wants to carry a pint home rather than eat in. That takeout option matters in a neighborhood built around walking between spots, letting visitors pick up ice cream on their way to or from dinner elsewhere in Avondale rather than needing to build an entire stop around it. Small-batch production, the method behind the O’Haras’ rotating flavors, generally means smaller runs churned more frequently rather than large volumes made to sit in a freezer for weeks, which lines up with the shop’s stated focus on local, seasonal ingredients that would not stay fresh in a bigger batch held over a long stretch of time. Even with three storefronts now open across Alabama, the Avondale shop still functions as the place where new ideas from the O’Haras’ kitchen tend to show up first, before a flavor makes its way onto the menu at the Homewood or Huntsville locations.