Zsa’s Ice Cream is closing, but you can chill: There’s plenty of time for a final scoop

For every food business that shuts down with little or no notice, Danielle Jowdy is doing the exact opposite with Zsa’s Ice Cream, her charming parlor on Germantown Avenue in Mount Airy.

Last month, Jowdy announced Zsa’s “grand closing”: December 2025, coinciding with the renewal of her lease and what she calls “the desire to have an entire year to make our full seasonal menu so customers could enjoy all their favorites one last time... and also to give my staff time to plan for their ‘what’s next?’ just as I will be for mine.”

Jowdy, 42, said she does not have a next step in mind. In short, she feels that she must expand Zsa’s to keep it going. But scaling the business would be beyond her “financial, emotional, and physical boundaries,” she said.

“You have to make a call as to whether you’re going to risk that and potentially dilute yourself, or take on something that’s so fragile because that ecosystem of financing, management, and operations has to be so perfect,” she said.

Jowdy said she loves the creative side, but “the founder’s dilemma is what gets you started in your business. That is not always what you wind up doing down the road.”

Long runway or not, the pain is being felt in the thriving commercial district, home of Adelie Coffee and a few doors from the hit Downtime Bakery.

» READ MORE: Our favorite ice cream shops

Ahmira Saunders, 22, who has worked at Zsa’s for three years, called Jowdy’s announcement “really shocking,” though she understands the reasons.

“I’m really sad about it,” said Diana Gould, shopping for pints with her mother, Diana Tirado, last week. “When we found out about it, all the neighborhood was up in arms.”

Since the pandemic, Jowdy keeps the door locked and Zsa’s dispenses cones, cups, and pints through a takeout window. “It’s fun to come up here and stand with your neighbors and chat,” Gould said, as Erica Dixon and her son Owen enjoyed their ice cream on a bench beneath a colorful mural.

“Today, we’re starting to build our stockpile,” Tirado said, patting her shopping bag filled with pints.

“I feel as though we’re going to have some small impact on an uptick in chest-freezer sales because people have been scheduling their purchases,” Jowdy said.

When Jowdy and her mother were packing up the family home in Connecticut for sale years ago, they found a hand-cranked ice cream machine the parents received as a wedding gift in 1980. As kids, Jowdy and her brother, Christopher, poured in skim milk and Hershey’s syrup “and we’d have at it,” she said.

Jowdy brought the machine back to Philadelphia and, armed with a 1980s-era Ben & Jerry’s cookbook, began making ice cream to take to parties and cookouts. She was working at a stained-glass studio as her dessert hobby grew.

Using two small machines, she made ice cream in a bakery production kitchen after she finished work for the day at a stained-glass studio. When she was laid off 14 years ago, she went professional.

Jowdy launched her business selling pints at the Media Farmers Market — in November. “It was dark, it was raining, it was cold,” she said. “I’m out there trying to make a living, and this woman comes to my table and says, ‘Ice cream, in this weather? It’s a bad idea,’ and she walks away. Something in my brain just flipped — like when someone tells you, ‘You can’t do that.’ Well, yes I can. Because she had diminished what I was trying to do, I had this idea in my head that we’re going to open an ice cream shop in December, and we’re going to sell ice cream in the snow. It became a mission of mine to prove that you can do this year-round.”

The name — say it “zahz” — comes from a nickname shared since childhood by Jowdy and her sister, Rebecca. “We saw the name ‘Zsa’ somewhere and started using it for each other,” Jowdy said. Years later, she noticed that Rebecca’s middle name, Suzanne, includes a “z” and an “a,” as does her own middle name, Elizabeth.

“People would always ask me, ‘Why ice cream?’ but the more appropriate question I realized was ‘why small business?’” Jowdy said. “Both my parents ran businesses that provided a service to our community, and I watched them have such pride in being a part of our community and seeing them wear all hats.”

Jowdy’s father, brother, and sister operate a funeral home, and her mother founded, owned, and operated her own Montessori school for about 30 years.

Before opening the shop in late 2018, Jowdy sold ice cream at farmer’s markets, off a retro ice cream truck at events, and by wholesale to stores like Weavers Way Co-op.

Zsa’s expanded into Whole Foods stores, but “it became perfectly clear that [only] the shop was where we needed to be,” Jowdy said. “In two weeks selling at Whole Foods, we sold less than we did in two days here. It’s a very different business. It’s about chasing volume and margins. You’re selling to a buyer, not to the public. You don’t have that interaction.”

Asked if this grand closing could give someone time to buy the business, Jowdy acknowledged that this was a possibility.

“If this doesn’t happen, our 100% plan is to put a bow on the magic we have created and say a final goodbye,” she said.