Business Profile: The Daily Moos, Yorktown
Photo credit: Neal Rentz
Mahopac resident Frank Realbuta and Dutchess Count resident Robert Covone, co-owners of The Daily Bagel in Yorktown, wanted to give local residents a new place to enjoy soft serve ice cream so they opened The Daily Moos in an adjacent stand on Route 202 on July 4.
“There’s no soft serve in the area,” Realbuta said last week, noting the new ice cream stand was the site of another ice cream store that previously closed years ago.
The name Daily Moos is a spinoff of the name The Daily Bagel and the name also sounds similar to “The Daily News,” Realbuta said. “It all kind of all worked together.”
“We always used to say as the years passed, one of these days we’re going to open up an ice cream shop,” Covone said.
Soft serve ice cream takes more work to create than hard ice cream, Realbuta explained. “But the product is something that this market needed,” he said. “It’s a fresher product.”
Aside from vanilla and chocolate, Daily Moos customers can choose Flavor Burst, which “infuses eight different types of flavors into vanilla,” such as strawberry, birthday cake and cotton candy, Realbuta said. The most popular Flavor Burst flavors at The Daily Moos have included pistachio, mocha, black cherry, cotton candy and birthday cake, the co-owners said.
The co-owners, who on occasion have served ice cream in their new stand, are working on bringing shakes and sundaes to their new business.
Behind the stand is an outdoor patio that has 16 seats. Most of The Daily Moos customers so far come from the northern Westchester area, Realbuta noted.
The duo plans to have a typical season that will run from April 1 through October 31, depending on the weather.
Realbuta said he particularly enjoys serving ice cream. “When you’re serving somebody a breakfast at seven o’clock in the morning, the typical commuter, that gentleman will walk in with a suit on. He’s stressed out. He’s got to get on the parkway,” he said. “Twelve hours later at seven o’clock in the evening, he comes with a tee shirt on and a pair of shorts with his family, stress free. He eats his ice cream and it’s in a whole better place than he was 12 hours earlier.”
The Daily Moos is located at 3535 Crompond Road (Route 202) in Yorktown. For more information, go to its Facebook page or call 914-930-8160.
