With a grand-opening celebration on Tuesday, plant-based ice cream shop Vía Láctea, which arrived here by way of Puerto Rico along with founders Reinaldo Sanchez and Lorivie Alicea, officially lifted off at 2 Whitney Avenue. The business’s name means “Milky Way” in Spanish, and, like the vast majority of the galaxy, there’s no dairy here, though the shop’s line of house-made frozen desserts—an array of permanent and seasonal flavors offered alongside freshly baked sweets—was surprisingly creamy, with a density and refinement that reminded me of gelato.
I discovered as much while tasting a flight of four scoops ($14), starting with the deliriously creative Home Planet. This homage to Earth offered a sweet blue ocean of coconut-based ice cream (naturally dyed using butterfly pea flower) with continents of green and brown matcha cake and cookie crumbles. A zing of lime zest was a delicious complement to the slightly earthy and bitter matcha, and the randomly distributed chunks of cake and cookie made every bite feel unique.
I then moved to the Guava Panetela, a play on a favorite Puerto Rican pastry. Sanchez describes the traditional version as “basically an almond cake with guava paste in the middle,” and those flavors have been beautifully translated into this creamier idiom. The sheet-white base tasted like a toasted almond bar, and “guava sauce ripples” offered bright caramel-like bursts of the tropical fruit. Crumbles of almond cake, meanwhile, added texture, heft and richness, especially where the sauce had seeped into the cake.
I’ve always loved pistachio ice cream, so, for my third choice, I couldn’t resist Vía Láctea’s variant: the Pistachio & Almond. It was differently earthy than the Home Planet and differently nutty than the Guava Panetela, with big hunks of roasted almond floating like asteroids in a lightly green base made with real pistachios.
My final selection was the Coffee Chip, where joe from Puerto Rico, specifically the Baraka Coffee Co. is blended into the base, which is then laced with dark and delicate chocolate “snaps.” With each spoonful, the coffee hit me first and the chocolate left me last, though they were so seamlessly balanced that I found it difficult to tell where the one ended and the other began.
As for Vía Láctea itself, the business actually began in 2018 as a non-commercial “passion project,” Sanchez says. Using the small galley kitchen they shared as roommates in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he and Alicea simply “started [making ice cream] flavors”—both dairy and non-dairy—“for our friends, because we wanted something cool to do.” Soon they were asked to provide the dessert course for a school function, where they connected with local food entrepreneurs, in turn leading to “a space in a small commercial kitchen in Santurce,” a San Juan neighborhood Sanchez describes as “the food heart of Puerto Rico.”
There, they operated as a ghost kitchen within a cafe space. The cafe would close at 3 p.m., and, at 4 p.m., one day a week, “Vía Láctea would pop up.” Otherwise, Sanchez says, “we would mostly do events—farmers’ markets, expos. That was our major source of revenue” until the pandemic made that impossible, forcing a pivot to takeaway pints. “And we got very popular with that concept.”
By that time, Sanchez says, Vía Láctea had become a “go-to” source of frozen desserts for Puerto Ricans with allergies and other dietary restrictions. The business was still offering dairy options when an opportunity to open a dedicated storefront in Santurce compelled a major decision. As the business grew, they could continue shouldering the burden of avoiding cross-contamination between dairy and non-dairy ingredients—as well as “wheat, nuts, and all of these other allergens”—or they could remove one of the two big variables, which, as we know, they did. It helped, Sanchez says, that sales had already been “dropping on the dairy side and growing on the non-dairy side.” Meanwhile, the ability to focus solely on the latter “helped us delve in deeper to flavors and profiles and how to work with the ingredients.”
As fate would have it, two years ago Sanchez found himself visiting New Haven, where his spouse was considering attending grad school. Dining out around town and seeing an unsaturated market for plant-based dessert options, he says he emailed City Hall and found deputy director of economic development Cathy Graves, who guided him and Alicea to the first steps of a path that would lead to Vía Láctea’s grand opening on Tuesday.
At nearly $5 for one scoop, $9 for two and $14 for a pint, pricing may seem high. Scale, innovation and the fact that everything here is handmade from quality ingredients are three factors, but there’s a fourth few if any of us would conjure on our own, since we aren’t ice cream makers ourselves. Like gelato, which also commands a premium over standard ice cream, Vía Láctea’s product “doesn’t have much overrun,” Sanchez explains, invoking a technical term that describes the amount of air incorporated during the mixing and freezing of ice cream, expressed as a ratio against the amount of actual product. Whereas standard ice cream reportedly averages an overrun of 100%, meaning a package of it contains as much air as cream, gelato, for its part, averages just 30%. So a pint from Vía Láctea is delivering far more product than, say, a pint from Ben & Jerry’s. “Air is free,” Sanchez points out, “but we really pay for it in [standard] ice cream.”
He and Alicea balance serious noses for the business with reach-for-the-stars whimsy. “We try to picture every scoop as its own little planet,” Sanchez says, including to the point of developing a Dark Matter Waffle vessel ($2.15 for a cone, $2.65 for a “dish”) that resembles the black vast of space—especially with a “planet” or two plunked into it. I tried a few crispy sample shards and, expecting chocolatey flavor given the color, was delighted to find that they tasted a lot like caramel corn. I was also surprised to learn that the Dark Matter Waffle, as opposed to the shop’s Vanilla Waffle ($1.50/$2), is gluten-free.
Like outer space itself, Vía Láctea is full of surprises. Unlike space, we know just how to explore them.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. Image 2 features, from left, Lorivie Alicea, Adner Rodriguez, Charlotte Munday, Reinaldo Sanchez, Shamilyz Santiago and Mackenzie Cruikshanx.
