Offbeat Creemee fans will soon be able to get their plant-based creemees, scoops, sundaes and shakes once again. Owner Aisha Bassett has teamed up with Maya Nguyen, owner of Uncommon Coffee, to share space in the Essex café — and yes, there will be affogatos and cold-brew floats.
Bassett is targeting a late-June opening for her new ice cream counter in the back of Uncommon’s spacious, library-like café at 19 Essex Way. She had been operating on a wholesale and pickup basis at a Burlington production space since last fall, when she closed Offbeat’s original scoop shop at Myers Memorial Pool in Winooski’s Landry Park. Now, she will move all production to Uncommon, and the two businesses will share the kitchen.
“Maya and I have been business friends for a couple years now, and we always joked about how cool it would be to team up,” Bassett said. “It happened naturally.”
The two businesses will overlap for a couple of hours in the afternoon, she said; Uncommon is open daily until 3 or 4 p.m., and Bassett expects Offbeat’s initial hours to be 1 to 8 p.m., Thursday through Sunday.
The Offbeat scoop shop menu will feature dairy-free flavors such as chocolate and vanilla creemees and creamsicle, ube and gluten-free brownie batter hard ice cream. Cold-brew floats — such as one topped with housemade caramel and Biscoff-style crumbs — will use Uncommon’s cold-brew.
“It’s really hard to sell ice cream by itself, and I think we’ll be able to feed off each other,” Bassett said of the partnership. “And we have similar names: Uncommon and Offbeat. The vibe is there.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Offbeat Creemee Moves Into Uncommon Coffee in Essex”
This article appears in The Animal Issue 2025.
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