The storefront at 6014 12th Ave S. Image: Sara Marie D’Eugenio

A couple of years ago when Darren McGill and Kryse Martin-McGill lived in Georgetown they noticed something...off. "Going out to eat a lot in that area, we realized there wasn’t a dessert place." (Cue ominous music.) Of course this was before Sweet Bumpas started scooping ice cream out of the former Six Strawberries window, and before Deep Sea Sugar and Salt's forthcoming market and cake shop. Still, there's a void for a proper dessert shop—and the McGills, the husband-and-wife duo behind Nate's Wings and Waffles, Happy Grillmore, and Central District Ice Cream Company, plan to fill it with soft serve and doughnuts.

Enter Seattle Freeze.

First, let's go over this double entendre of a name. Last September Central District Ice Cream collaborated with Louie Gong of Eighth Generation on a lineup of flavors, one of which was dubbed the Seattle Freeze (deep chocolate with Salish sea salt and almond cookie crumble). It's also of course poking fun at our city's notoriously prickly social code. But what better way to thaw our icy ways than with some frozen treats?

The ice cream at Seattle Freeze, says McGill, is a bit of a hybrid that's half way between scoop ice cream and soft serve. See, in regular ice cream there can be crunchy, textural components like chocolate chips. Soft serve? Not so much. But at the Georgetown shop a machine will take an ice cream base, incorporate add-ins, and then churn it all out into soft serve like the frozen treat sorcery that it is.

Flavors will be very much akin to those at CD Ice Cream—pineapple mint, coconut, chocolate black sesame, maybe a Seattle Freeze flavor comeback—and will likewise rotate every month or so. They plan to have a menu of suggested flavor-and-topping combos, or you can always go rogue and order whatever swirls your world.

As for the doughnuts, they've partnered with the folks behind Big Boys and Poke Wai, who plan to sling Filipino-flavored goods. That means a variety of doughnuts styles with homemade glazes and toppings: some cake, some raised, and some custard-filled. There's an ube flavor and a black sesame version currently in doughnut testing mode.

The space at 6014 12th Avenue South, an old office site, will open hopefully early next month, says McGill. They definitely want to be ready to go come mid-June, aka peak ice cream–eating season.

Update: Just in time for the warm weather, Seattle Freeze's soft open is June 15.