VCA Spotlight: Two Roosters opens shop in historic building

The WRAL.com Voters' Choice Award winner for best ice cream now has three locations.

Posted 1:10 p.m. Sep 22, 2020 — Updated 1:10 p.m. Sep 22, 2020

Kathy Hanrahan, Out

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DURHAM, N.C. — The reigning WRAL Voters' Choice Award winner for best ice cream opened its third location amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Two Roosters, which won the best ice cream award in 2019, opened its Golden Belt Campus location in August.

Located across from Hi-Wire Brewing, Two Roosters has an upstairs outdoor patio and ample greenspace outside for enjoying ice cream.

Two Roosters is located in what used to be known as the pump room of an old coal refinery that used to generate the power for the textile plant. Their outdoor seating sits next to a towering smoke stack.

"They would burn coal and then the smoke would rise from the stacks and power this whole place. So, it's a pretty amazing conversion from an old coal source to now an ice cream house," Two Roosters owner Jared Plummer said.

Two Roosters started with a turquoise blue ice cream truck at The Cookery in Durham in 2014 and has grown to include two stores in Raleigh, with locations in the Person Street Plaza and the Greystone Village Shopping Center. Besides the Golden Belt location, Two Roosters also has a spot at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park.

The shop is known for its 10 "forever flavors" and its unique rotating list of monthly guest collaborations.

"The menu is very strategic," Plummer said last year on the Out and About Podcast. "Using the food truck experience, there was a lot of flavors that I was able to vet during those years. Naturally, there's a few that popped up that were really popular, so going into the brick-and-mortar arena, I knew there were the regular flavors that were tried and true. People loved them and knew us for those flavors."

In summer 2019, the shop was named one of America's best ice cream parlors by USA Today.