Isle Brook Crest opened in June 2019 in a converted carriage house on Post Road West in Westport, Connecticut. Margot Ellison had spent the previous winter retrofitting the space herself, mostly on weekends, with a contractor friend who owed her a favor. The Carpigiani arrived in April. The first batch, a fior di latte, was too sweet. She dialed back the sucrose by 8% and tried again. The second batch was right. That ratio is still the base for everything white and creamy on the current menu.
The shop almost did not survive the summer of 2020. It did, partly because Westport residents were home and walking the neighborhood, and partly because Margot started doing pre-order pickups through a simple Google Form before any of the local competitors thought to. By fall 2020, there was a waiting list for the Saturday morning pickup slot. She hired her first employee, Dani Reyes, in March 2021. Dani still runs the front of house on weekends and knows the regulars by name and by flavor preference.
Margot Ellison spent six years working pastry at Aureole in New York before a residency at a gelateria in Bologna changed everything she thought she knew about frozen dessert. She came back to the States in 2018 with a notebook full of base ratios and a refusal to use stabilizer blends. She opened Isle Brook Crest in 2019 in a converted carriage house in Westport, Connecticut. She turned down a wholesale account with a regional grocery chain in 2022 because the volume would have required a batch freezer she didn't trust. She reads seed catalogs in January and plans the summer menu around what actually comes up in the ground.