Pretty Cool Ice Cream to Open a Lincoln Park Location

A second location of Pretty Cool Ice Cream, Dana Salls Cree’s beloved Logan Square frozen dessert shop, is scheduled to open in mid-October near the corner of Belden and Lincoln in Lincoln Park. The opening was originally planned for the summer but was held back by pandemic-related equipment delays.

The menu in Lincoln Park will be exactly the same as in Logan Square, Salls Cree says, though eventually she hopes to create a few shop-specific pops. All the pops will still be made in Logan Square and transported over. As soon as the new shop opens, both locations will roll out a new menu of ice cream sandwiches, starting with chocolate chip cookies and vanilla ice cream and a special Halloween “Pretty Cool I Scream” sandwich that looks like a bloody eyeball. There will also be trick or treat pops inspired by Nerds and Snickers.

The Lincoln Park shop will be near the site of the former Children’s Memorial Hospital. Salls Cree chose the neighborhood, she says, because it’s home to so many kids, both actual children and DePaul University students. The new shop will have many of the same design elements as the current one — the stadium seating, the popsicle-shaped doors, the murals of animals — but with a peach and gray color scheme instead of pink, plus a mural by the artist Sparkle & Supply that incorporates actual sprinkles.

Barry Brecheisen/Eater Chicago

For now, the new shop, like its Logan Square counterpart, will serve ice cream at the walk-up window only; Salls Cree says the 700-square-foot space is too small for social distancing, and she doesn’t want to let customers inside again until kids can be vaccinated. “It’s built to be a magnet for children to touch and explore,” Salls Cree says. “It’s impossible to tell them to come in and take their masks off only to eat ice cream and then not touch anything.”

Salls Cree, a respected pastry chef who worked at Publican and Blackbird, opened her first shop in 2018, a collaboration with Bang Bang Pies’ Michael Ciapciak. The brand has grown with the pops sold at stores like Foxtrot and at select restaurants.

The first 200 people to visit the new shop on opening day in Lincoln Park will receive a free birthday cake ice cream pop in honor of Pretty Cool’s third anniversary in business. And, for the record, Salls Cree still has a few CM Punk ice cream bars left over in Logan Square.

Pretty Cool Ice Cream Lincoln Park, 709 W. Belden Avenue, scheduled to open mid-October.