September 18, 2018 – Monterey-area local food lovers were shocked on Saturday to learn from their Instagram feeds that Ron Mendoza, the founding chef-partner of Revival Ice Cream, is no longer with the artisanal ice cream business that he dreamed up just a few years ago.
“It is with great sadness that I announce that I am no longer part of Revival Ice Cream,” Mendoza wrote.
“Over three years ago a friend and I wanted to make a positive impact in our city. The idea of bringing food craftsmanship, community and creativity to Monterey was what we set out to do and I feel we achieved it.
However, this is just business and at this point the investors would prefer to continue on their own. And so my idea and my time with Revival has come to an end…”
For the record, Mendoza said in an interview with Edible Monterey Bay that while the wildly successful business has evolved away from his original idea of a chef-driven place where the former executive pastry chef at Aubergine could foster creativity and community in the ways that he intended, he is hugely supportive of his talented assistant, Caroline Thomson, who is taking over as production manager, and wants to see the business he created continue to thrive.
“I really encourage anyone to still go there,” Mendoza said, noting that before working with him at Aubergine and Revival, Thomson had worked with other noted pastry chefs such as Dana Cree at Chicago’s Blackbird. “It’s still going to be a great product.”
He was also complimentary of the focus on the business side of Adriana Shuman, Revival’s majority owner and operations manager, who let him go last week.
Shulman returned the compliments, saying, “I absolutely want the best for Ron.” She added that in terms of “technical proficiency and creativity” there was absolutely no question regarding his contribution, but said she didn’t feel his support “when it came to growing the business.”
For his part, Mendoza said that he was having less and less say in various business matters, including sourcing ingredients, and with that, fostering ties and supporting other local food businesses in the community.
“We just wanted to be a nice small shop,” Mendoza said of the vision of he and his original partner, Nicole Pahl, who handled the business side until parting ways with Revival soon after its launch and Shuman’s stepping up her own involvement in the running of the business. “I felt that it became a little more difficult to be as creative as we could be.”
Both agreed that those differences contributed to the end of the partnership.
Going forward, Shuman plans to promote a team model in the kitchen and the business overall, and said that the values of sustainability and producing “the best quality product out there” are things that she is passionate about and will remain the same.
Shuman also said that new products are on the way, and noted that the company has just launched on its website its Community Giveback Program, through which 20% of the profits from its reusable stainless steel pint containers will go to a local nonprofit, chosen by Revival’s staff. Recipients will change each quarter, with the Hospice Giving Foundation receiving proceeds from the 4th quarter and MEarth in the first quarter of 2019.
Meanwhile, even after spending six days a week making ice cream at Revival and being taken by surprise by his own departure, Mendoza is already thinking about what is next.
Revival remains one of the few artisanal ice cream companies in the country with the in-house pasteurization capability needed to make ice cream fully from scratch, and even before working at Aubergine, the massively imaginative chef had worked in such acclaimed kitchens as Napa’s French Laundry and Los Angeles’s Patina. It’s safe to expect the same devotion to technique and craftsmanship that he poured into Revival from Mendoza’s next enterprise.
His ideal would be something akin to a sushi bar, where he would have direct contact with a small number of diners, serving items that would all be a personal expression of his creativity. But he admits that the economics of this would not work in the pastry realm.
Mendoza also points out that our area still doesn’t have something like Los Gatos’s Manresa Bread or San Francisco’s Tartine.
One thing he is certain of, he wants to stay in the Monterey area and he wants to make a meaningful contribution to the local food community.
“Everyone who does anything that has integrity and value is going to elevate our local food community,” Mendoza says. “I put myself up to that same standard.”
Meantime, you can find him this Sunday promoting community and creating delicious food with his fellow local pastry chefs Ben Spungin and Yulanda Santos at the Youth Arts Collective benefit in Carmel. Call 375-9922 to purchase tickets.
About the author
SARAH WOOD—founding editor and publisher of Edible Monterey Bay—has had a life-long passion for food, cooking, people and our planet.
She planted her first organic garden and cared for her first chicken when she was in elementary school in a farming region of Upstate New York.
Wood spent the early part of her career based in Ottawa, Canada, working in international development and international education. After considering culinary school, she opted to pursue her loves for writing, learning about the world and helping make it a better place by obtaining a fellowship and an MA in Journalism from New York University.
While working for a daily newspaper in New Jersey, she wrote stories that helped farmers fend off development and won a state-wide public service award from the New Jersey Press Association for an investigative series of articles about a slumlord who had hoodwinked ratings agencies and investment banks into propping him up with some early commercial mortgage securitizations. The series led Wood to spend several years in financial journalism, most recently, as editor-in-chief of the leading magazine covering the U.S. hedge-fund industry.
Wood now lives with her family in Washington, DC, where she is a freelance writer and manages communications for Samaritan Ministry, an antipoverty and antiracist nonprofit that provides struggling Greater Washington residents with highly personalized and compassionate life counseling and coaching.
