Godby tries to play both sides. “It’s not like this is WD-50,” the food blogger Jesse Friedman explains, referring to the New York restaurant that serves its eggs Benedict with cylinders of poached yolk, tidy as batteries, and cubes of deep-fried hollandaise sauce, coated in English muffin crumbs. “What Jake makes is clearly recognizable as ice cream. It’s even ice cream that’s churned.” Godby, you could argue, is even of Waters’s pastoral San Francisco, making flavors, like Huckleberry Crème Fraîche, that showcase fetishistically selected ingredients. But he does not always choose the sanctioned taste profiles. For instance, he also makes Peanut Butter Curry — which includes house-made peanut butter and Vadouvan Golden Mix, a top-of-the-line blend of garlic, shallots, onions and spices. Godby does this under ice cream’s cloak of innocence and with a straight face, in the same spirit that Sarah Silverman dresses like a 12-year-old and tells bigoted jokes. “I only make ice cream I think tastes good,” he claims. Why do you not want to eat a foie gras ice cream sandwich? Or, why do you? The effect is disorienting. The joke might be on us.

According to Vahey, the store’s frontman, Godby is an artist who uses food as his medium: “He’s wielding his paintbrush in ice cream, and Jake would never tell you that.” That might seem like a slight overreach, pretentious even, but Vahey does have a point. Godby has painted or made prints, as a hobby, throughout his adult life. The only exception being the two years that just ended, the two years during which he conceived and opened Humphry Slocombe. Currently he’s working on a portrait series of Isabella Blow, the British eccentric and magazine editor who killed herself by drinking weed killer. Godby says of his attraction to her, “I like people who live their lives as art.”

A WEEK LATER, in the back of the shop, Godby was again in his Chuck Taylors and apron, making Coconut Candy Cap Caramel sorbet. Because he doesn’t want to spend $100,000 on a commercial stove, hood and ventilation system, he uses a Bunsen burner to melt the sugar for caramel. (The hot plate he uses for most cooking jobs doesn’t get hot enough.) Godby opened a Ziploc bag of dried candy cap mushrooms and offered me a smell. “A little goes a long way,” he said of the horsy aroma. Godby once tried making porcini ice cream. That and harissa are his only acknowledged busts.

Image THE SCOOPER Jake Godby (at his shop) may be soft-spoken, but he’s no Mister Softee. Credit... Dwight Eschliman for The New York Times

Godby dumped a half-cup of the mushrooms into a spice grinder. He then pulled out a 20-liter bucket, poured in two gallons of Straus ice cream base (California code requires anybody selling more than 2,500 gallons of ice cream a year and not pasteurizing on premises to start with a pasteurized “mix”) and set to work on Salt and Pepper, adding Si­chuan, pink and cubeb peppercorns and sea salt. Ice cream is simple, but its chemistry is not. Ice cream, according to C. Clarke, the author of “The Science of Ice Cream,” is “just about the most complex food colloid of all.” It’s an emulsion (fat droplets in aqueous solution), a sol (ice crystals suspended in liquid) and a foam. Eventually Godby’s young, bearded assistant returned carrying three plastic bags of bourbon and bananas. “For the first time ever the guy at the liquor store said, ‘Why do you buy so much alcohol?’ ” the assistant told Godby. “I said I put it in ice cream. He said, ‘WHAT?!’ I said he should come by sometime.”

Godby nodded. He’s not a talker. Vahey describes him as “pathologically shy.” Godby did mention that the previous weekend in Sonoma, he walked by the dead body of a homeless man who’d been hit by a car. He knew this was a dark tale, and entirely out of sync with the expected portrait of the happy ice cream man selling ice cream to the happy children. But that was the point. Godby enjoyed the dissonance. The batch freezer whirred in the background. “That’s the ice cream talking,” he said, then sank into quiet again.

Godby grew up in Zanesville, Ohio, the only child of a mother who worked 30 years at AT&T and a father who owned a bar. Godby describes Zanesville as “the kind of town where you can’t buy olive oil”; himself as “an odd kid.” “I’d just wander off; I still do,” Godby said, passing the Salt and Pepper to his assistant to freeze and returning to the Coconut Caramel Candy Cap, dumping a large can of congealed coconut milk into the stainless-steel pot. Godby’s mother, Linda, is laconic, like her son. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” she told me when I called. “Jake was always backward. You can tell that yourself.” When I asked what she meant by “backward,” she described Jake as “fearless.” “Jake was never afraid to try anything. At age 5 he had a fit because he wanted to go to a big mall and shop by himself.” One of Godby’s strongest childhood memories is of watching one of his father’s bar regulars shake so hard in the morning that he had to rig a string, as a pulley, around his neck to help raise his shot glass to his mouth. Predictably, Godby hated school — “all weird kids do,” he told me. At Ohio State University, he majored in art, smoked a lot of pot and watched a lot of TV, including “Are You Being Served?” When he committed to open Humphry Slocombe, Godby had 31 ice cream cones tattooed on his arm. Part of the impulse, he said, was to have something to show San Francisco’s fanatical food community, to deflect attention away from more deep-seated aspects of himself.