Published September 2003

Local Scoop appeals
to all ages

Snohomish County Business Journal/JOHN WOLCOTT Anna Jacobsen — and her friends — help make The Local Scoop’s old-fashioned ice cream parlor a popular place to visit in Old Town Arlington.

By John Wolcott
SCBJ Editor

The Local Scoop restaurant and ice cream parlor at Fifth Street and Olympic Avenue in Arlington has been a magnetic attraction for people since it opened nearly two years ago with a satisfying menu of sandwiches, salads and homemade soups and pies.

“We have a very broad range of customers, from little kids to retired folks who remember this kind of restaurant as a ’50s icon,” said owner Dawn Williams, who runs the restaurant and adjacent ice cream parlor with her husband, Dennis. “We also found a lot of young families will come downtown after eating at home and get ice cream desserts.”

The ice cream became so popular that people crowding in for desserts at the small counter space at The Local Scoop were creating a bottleneck for people coming in for meals, she said. So she transformed the adjacent gift shop — the business she had run before buying the restaurant — into a large, full-service ice cream shop.

“After Rotten Ralph’s closed, the town didn’t have an ice cream parlor. Every little town in America needs one, so we opened one. On the Fourth of July, we served 508 cones by 5 p.m. and stopped counting,” she said.

Ironically, when she researched the history of her gift shop-turned-ice cream parlor for Arlington’s centennial celebrations this year, she discovered the building had been an ice cream and confections store before, decades ago.

Like many business owners in Arlington, Dawn and Dennis Williams are longtime residents.

They first met in the second grade, and “Cupid struck in our senior year,” Dawn Williams said. Some 23 years later, they’re in business together at The Local Scoop.

But the secret to their success goes beyond good food and ice cream. It’s the service.

“Everybody who walks through our doors signs our paychecks. People want to feel important, so we let them know they matter to us. That’s how we survive. If you just want to be a number, there’s a lot of malls out there for you,” she said.

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