Montreal · soft serve
Kem CoBa
Kem CoBa is credited by La Presse as the shop that made inventive soft serve a Montreal category rather than a Dairy Queen afterthought, and its founders speak on the record about the years of failed batches behind a single flavour. It is the clearest case on record here of a maker explaining, specifically, what artisanal production costs.
What we know
- Founded 2011 by pastry chefs Vincent Beck and Ngoc Phan; La Presse (2025) calls it 'la première crémerie montréalaise à twister ensemble crème glacée molle et sorbet avec des parfums inusités'
- Never announces the next month's flavour: 'le glacier ne révèle d'ailleurs jamais ce qui s'en vient' (La Presse, 2019), after Vincent Beck describes years of trial and error calibrating the soft-serve machine
- Vincent Beck, on working without shortcuts: '« Quand on travaille artisanalement avec les vrais produits, pas de colorants, pas d'artifices, des fois, c'est dur. »' (La Presse, 2019)
- Distinctive, repeatedly non-Western flavour vocabulary: café vietnamien, feuille de pandan, fruit de la passion, cacahuète (La Presse, 2018)
- Became a Mile End institution within months of its 2011 opening; production for the original Fairmount storefront was later relocated to the second, Ormeaux Street location (La Presse, 2018)
- Status
- open
- Address
- 60, avenue Fairmount Ouest, Montréal, QC H2T 2M2
- Maker
- Vincent Beck and Ngoc Phan, chefs and owners (both trained as pastry chefs)
- Opened
- 2011
- Website
- kemcoba.com/
- Last checked
- 2026-08-21
Something wrong here? Tell us.