Tomorrow is officially the end of National Ice Cream Month, so naturally Saturday Sweets is going to use this last chance to celebrate again!  This week we are checking out ice cream wholesaler, Sweet Melody Ice Cream and chatting with the mind behind the madness, Mike Romeu. 

Mike and I spent nearly two hours talking the about inspiration, the ins and outs of ice cream making, how exciting it is to be part of the culinary movement taking place in our amazing city and how fun it would be to venture into collaborating with other Miami chefs – his dream collab: Michael Schwartz! 

Sweet Melody Ice Cream is named after Mike’s adorable 4 year old daughter, Melody. She’s the light of his life and the reason behind everything he does. His ultimate goal is to someday have his own shop with her name on the marquee. During our time together it was easy to see the excitement and passion flowing through him.  He’s proud of what he’s accomplished in such little time – Sweet Melody came out of nowhere in January this year and shows no signs of slowing down.  I’m jumping on this bandwagon and following him wherever he goes.

Here are some of the highlights of our chat:

Tell us a bit of your background and what made you decide to go into ice cream making?

In 2008, my fiancé at the time was a culinary arts student and she was amazing in the kitchen and I was really into it sort of just as a hobby.  I don’t know how but one night we hatched the idea of a Latin inspired ice cream, which has since been done by Azucar, but at the time they did not yet exist and we thought we had this great concept.  We were going to pitch it to Sedano’s and stores like that because her grandmother was Cuban and my grandmother was Cuban.  We had a lot of Cuban background between us.  We had this idea and a hand-crank ice cream maker that we messed around with a little bit. 

We didn’t get too far into it, but some of our first batches weren’t too bad.  Unfortunately, she ended up passing in 2009.  After that I was in mourning for about a year.  Eventually I got back into the bar industry and was there for a long time.  I had almost forgotten about ice cream, but after Melody’s mom and I separated, I turned to retail therapy and bought kitchen gadgets.  One being a pretty good quality ice cream maker and an immersion blender.   Around that time I started working for my friend’s catering company.