High on a pole next to a red-roofed, barn-shaped building on Route 25 in Mattituck, a sign shaped like an eye peers down on an ever-crowded parking lot — bright white and clear as day in the sunshine, all aglow in the evening. A graphic of a banana split is displayed up top and, just underneath, the words that melt the cone-loving hearts of all North Forkers: Magic Fountain Homemade Ice Cream.
Below that, however, sits a second sign that’s the real showstopper: a rotating smattering of the hundreds and hundreds of flavors (at last count, up to 450) that owner Chaudry Ali and his team can churn out any given day. Some are classic, some are seasonal and some are outright experimental with ice cream serving as frequent muse to Ali, who creates combinations with gleeful gusto. There’s blackberry ginger, mint chip, cherry pistachio, nutter butter, cannoli, Cookie Monster, sweet corn, key-lime pie, coquito, cookie dough, chocolate blondie, peanut butter fudge, Guinness, rum raisin, salted caramel and kulfi.
Housed in a former Dairy Queen (because that’s how it all started on July 6, 1966), Ali’s Magic Fountain Ice Cream has, for just shy of 20 years, been churning and scooping myriad flavors of the fun, creamy, dreamy homemade frozen treat that are more than worth a lick.
Adventure — and Customer Service — Are the Sprinkles of Life
Ali’s path to ice cream wasn’t exactly a soft serve.
“I’ll be honest with you, ice cream wasn’t my thing,” he laughs, sitting in his office high in the peak of Magic Fountain’s second floor. Behind him, on an uncluttered bulletin board, hangs a thumbtacked sign displaying the name of his favorite band, Metallica. “I bought the store because my wife grew up in Mattituck, and she said that’s a great business to have. So, on her words, I bought it.”
But there’s a little more to the story than that. Born in Pakistan, Ali was the sweet rebel of his family, dreaming of travel and adventure.
“There’s a peer pressure in that culture to be somebody,” he says. “Out of my family, everybody is some kind of doctor or some kind of specialist. And then there’s me: the black sheep!”
Or, perhaps, the bold one. It was 1983 and Ali was in the 10th grade. His father worked for an airline, where one of the job perks was an occasional free plane ticket to anywhere in the world. When his sense of adventure could no longer be contained, Ali sweet-talked his way into a one-way ticket to Europe one afternoon when he knew his father would be away from his desk for lunch. By the time his dad realized what had occurred, his son was already on a plane headed west.
After two years backpacking around Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Ali decided America was calling. He arrived in 1985 and hasn’t stopped exploring since. He’s driven cross country more than a half-dozen times, has visited every national park possible and is a big fan of Guy Fieri’s show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” — and makes it a point to visit as many of the independent food stops Fieri recommends (and hey, if the chef is reading this, perhaps he might consider an episode on Magic Fountain). Ali’s pumpkin-orange Jeep is chock-a-block with stickers of all the sites and parks he’s visited. And the Mattituck woman he met and fell in love with along the way? Her first name is Journey.
Of course.
All Roads Lead to Ice Cream
After getting married, Ali and his wife settled in Stony Brook. He kept trying to find a career path that suited him and ignited his creativity, but a deep desire to work with his hands and own a business kept him from climbing the corporate ladder. So when a colleague at a former job mentioned that her husband had an ice cream parlor for sale in Journey’s hometown of Mattituck, his interest was piqued.
“I always wanted to work with my own hands. That’s the number one thing,” Ali says. “I like creating things. Here, I get to create. I get to be my own boss.”
The couple bought the place in 2006 and opened for business the following year. Constant exploration of the land of ice cream flavors seemed to suit Ali’s indefatigable wanderlust. Still, a brick-and-mortar business means hunkering down, and being his own boss turned out to be a good fit. Two of Ali’s most important changes to the old business model: making the ice cream in-house and staying open year-round. Another change? Finding employees with the right spirit.
“Number one, eye contact is very important to me because you’re going to be dealing with customers,” he says. And if you really want a job at Magic Fountain? To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, ask not what Magic Fountain can do for you, but what you can do for Magic Fountain. Since space is tight and everything at the parlor is made by hand — the ice cream, the cakes, ice cream sandwiches and parfaits — those without a strong work ethic need not apply.
“Sometimes people get upset if there’s a long line … and they get mad at the kids,” says Ali. “I just say, ‘Hey, it’s just ice cream! What are you so mad about?’” (Photo credit: Jeremy Garretson)
“If you walk in here and you want a job, and your first question is, ‘How much are you gonna pay me?’, it’s not going to work out,” Ali says with a gentle shrug. “These kids who work here, they are hardworking kids. I don’t hire slackers.”
In return, Ali makes sure they’re treated well — especially by customers.
“Sometimes people get upset because of a long line, or it takes them an hour to get in on a very busy day, and they get mad at the kids. And I say, how do you think these girls are feeling? They’ve been here five hours serving grumpy people like you!” he laughs. “I protect my business and I protect the kids because they are vulnerable. They don’t know what to say to an angry customer. I just say, ‘Hey, it’s just ice cream. What are you so mad about?’ You don’t know how many times that I have heard something when I’m in the back making ice cream, and I go up front right away. When [the customer] sees an adult show up, all of a sudden they change.”
Most employees start the job in their teens and many stay on, growing up over the years at the bustling shop. Marianne Seifried has worked at Magic Fountain for a decade, learning all aspects of the business and now serves as Ali’s number-one ice cream cake decorator.
Another longtime employee and Mattituck local, Helen Chen, spent six years working alongside Ali and the crew. Now the general manager over at Smokey Buns in East Hampton, she still comes back to visit and check in. She started working at Magic Fountain at 15, scooped ice cream through the rest of high school and summers during college, and even helped hold down the fort through the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Not counting my parents at Jan’s Chinese Food, Ali was my first owner-operator boss. … From Ali, I learned what it truly means to operate a small business successfully: how to support staff like family, greet delivery drivers like guests, treat vendors with respect and give back to the local community,” Chen says. “Magic Fountain was not just my first job — it was where I learned that kindness is not just part of the job… it is the job.
Flavors, Near and Far
On any given day at Magic Fountain you’ll find up to 65 scoopable offerings on hand at all times: around 45 regular flavors permanently on the menu, five new flavors that rotate in and out every couple weeks, four sorbets, four vegan options and two sugar-free. And then there’s the abundance of toppings, the soft serve, the cakes and novelties and the pre-packed pints in the fridges up front for an even-quicker fix.
First thing in the morning, Seifried is there making the custom cakes. Another colleague soon arrives to make all the novelties needed for the day — the ice cream sandwiches (Ali sells about four or five dozen of those a day alone), parfaits and the like. After that, the process of making ice cream for the week begins. Each completed batch produces about five gallons in about a half hour; there’s only one machine to make it all.
“Every flavor is different. Some stuff goes right in the machine; some stuff has to be hand mixed afterward,” Ali says. “Like we just made Krispy Krunch. It starts with a plain base. Then you got to put the pint of Twix and pint of Kit Kats all chopped up, and then a couple of ladles of caramel. And then you mix it a little [by hand] and then you do another layer on top of it.”
After a batch is made, it goes into a special deep freezer at 25°F for 12 hours. It’s then transferred to another, slightly warmer freezer so that the batches can be at a more scoopable temperature without risking icing over.
Ali’s homemade flavors and creativity don’t just stop with scoops. There are cakes, sandwiches, ice cream “cupcakes,” shakes and all manor of ice cream treats. (Photo credit: Jeremy Garretson)
There is a truck box freezer that holds about 500 buckets of ice cream, which in the summer goes full-throttle and is packed to the gills. If a flavor is popular, like mint chip, Ali and his crew will have about 50 buckets of it on hand at all times. For a specialty flavor, maybe half that.
One of the creations perhaps most dear to Ali’s heart started as a niche experiment in 2009: the kulfi. A nod to his Pakistani heritage, it’s a fragrant mix of cardamom, rosewater and crushed pistachios.
“We grew up with kulfi as a dessert. The food in Pakistan is so spicy, and if you have kulfi after it just complements it very well and takes the heat off,” Ali says. “When I first came out here and I saw there were a lot of Pakistani and Indian people who were day-trippers out, I was like oh, we can make kulfi!”
It took a little time for regulars to embrace it but quickly became a fave in consistent rotation on the menu. “Someone might say to me, ‘Why the hell do you make this thing?’” he says. “But the person next time is like, ‘Oh my God, Ali, this is the best thing I ever tried!’ That’s why we carry so many flavors, so we have something for everyone.”
