Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams

Eight years behind the counter

Cayenne met chocolate before the company had its present name. Jeni Britton Bauer, Chef at Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams in Easton, Columbus, still builds flavor from that kind of collision. Her route began at the counter, not in a restaurant brigade: scooping, making ice cream, watching people decide in front of the case. She has described working at the counter and making all the ice cream for 8 years, a stretch that gave her the habit of reading preference as closely as recipe. Before Jeni’s, she had Scream Ice Creams at the North Market, where essential oils and scent work fed early flavors such as Salty Caramel, Wildberry Lavender, and Queen City Cayenne. She closed that first venture, took an ice cream short course at Penn State, then founded Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams in Columbus in 2002. Today her formal title is Founder and Chief Creative Officer, but the work still returns to the same question she learned bench-side: how a flavor lands with the person holding the spoon.

Scent carried in cream

The method here starts with ice cream as a carrier of scent. Britton Bauer came to that through art, art history, perfumery, and the practical discipline of the scoop shop, where an idea has to hold in a cold case and then open quickly on the tongue. The house is known for an ultra-smooth, buttercream-like body, bright flavor, and clean finish, without artificial ingredients. The menu moves between more than 50 flavors, with year-round signatures and limited collections shaped by season, pop culture, culinary history, and collaboration. Brown Butter Almond Brittle, Brambleberry Crisp, Salted Peanut Butter with Chocolate Flecks, and Darkest Chocolate sit in that line: familiar enough to invite a first spoonful, built with enough structure to keep the flavor from flattening. Ingredients have been part of the discipline from the beginning, including milk from Ohio family farms, Ohio honey, whole fruits, vegetables, herbs, fair-trade vanilla, and bean-to-bar chocolate. The point is not novelty for its own sake. It is composition, cold, fat, scent, texture, and finish brought into balance by repetition.

The counter keeps the tempo

The room at Easton keeps the work close to the hand. Counter service makes the pass visible: the dip into the tub, the turn of the wrist, the scrape against the cone, the pause while someone chooses between fruit, chocolate, caramel, or salt. Small seating areas fill quickly, and the noise gathers around the case rather than above it. That suits ice cream. It is a craft of brief decisions and immediate return, made in batches but received one spoon at a time. The bright, inviting room carries some of the old scoop-shop ritual Britton Bauer noticed early, when people hesitated, committed, tasted, and handed a spoon to someone beside them. The counter is still where the flavor becomes social.

A Columbus recipe that traveled

From its first Columbus shop, Jeni’s grew into more than 80 scoop shops, but the Easton counter still reads as part of the original argument: ice cream can carry memory, scent, and point of view without losing its directness. Britton Bauer’s next move is not framed as a single opening or release here; the continuing work is the flavor program itself, where a limited collection can sit beside Brambleberry Crisp.