Museum of Ice Cream co-founder dishes on "universe of treats" coming to Boston
BOSTON - The new Museum of Ice Cream opening in Boston next year represents a homecoming for Manish Vora.
The co-founder and co-CEO of the interactive experience, which is coming to the Seaport in 2024, grew up in Wayland. Vora said opening the two-story attraction in Boston, where he used to love visiting the Museum of Fine Arts and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, is "such a dream come true."
"Going into Boston was a treat, that's where the culture was," he told WBZ-TV's Courtney Cole. "The Seaport has changed a lot since I grew up in the 90s."
Speaking of treats, the Museum of Ice Cream will have plenty of them when it opens at 121 Seaport Blvd. Visitors can get "unlimited" sweet treats during the 60-to-90-minute experience.
"Ice cream, toppings, candy, sweets," Vora said. "There is an entire universe of treats."
He said there will be soft serve, hard ice cream, "amazing" vegan alternatives and even some "weird stuff" like insect toppings.
"We'll have different flavors every season for people to come back to, and of course some odes to our Boston culture," Vora said.
A Boston-themed experience
The Museum of Ice Cream also has locations in New York, Chicago, Austin and Singapore. Tickets for the New York experience start at $25 on weekdays and $35 on weekends.
Boston will have the museum's signature "sprinkle pool" for visitors to jump in, but it also promises local flare.
A Fenway Park-inspired carnival at the museum will pay tribute to the iconic ballpark.
"We're going to have some baseball bats, we're going to have all these odes to the Green Monster and other things," Vora said. "Every museum is unique and this Boston one is going to be special."
An ice cream "oasis"
Vora says this will be the company's "most advanced museum" yet. But the goal is to make visitors feel like a kid again.
"It feels like an oasis and to me, ice cream is the ultimate oasis," he said. "Ice cream takes you to another place. . . it takes you out of all the adult worries, the traffic on the Mass Pike. . . nothing's going to matter on the day you come to the Museum of Ice Cream."
There is plenty of good ice cream to be found in New England - WBZ-TV viewers voted on their 50 favorite Boston-area shops back in 2021. Vora hopes the Museum of Ice Cream will be a welcome addition to the region..
"Especially with the quality of ice cream shops, the quality of restaurants in our town and across the state, we really believe that the Boston Museum of Ice Cream is going to be the best food and beverage experience that we have," he said.