The 76-year-old Santa Cruz ice cream shop known for garlic ice cream

On warm summer evenings in Santa Cruz, excited kids, stoned college students and sentimental old-timers gather outside the squat red building on Ocean Street to lick ice cream cones. 

For decades, Marianne’s Ice Cream has drawn crowds for its extensive, unique selection of flavors. First opened by Tom and Lenore Becker in 1947 with just 13 flavors, the shop now serves a rotating selection of 105.

When you arrive at Marianne’s, you grab a number from the ticket machine and listen for your number to be called. The dozens of flavors are posted on little signs wrapping the length of the wall behind the counter. 

Once you’ve made your incredibly difficult decision — if it helps, the most popular flavors are vanilla, 1020 (caramel ice cream with a chocolate swirl and cookies), chocolate mint chip, and strawberry — you order and then proceed to the dining room with red checkerboard tiles to enjoy it.

Aside from gossiping teens and toddlers with sticky fingers, you may also spot someone doggedly scratching at the dancing cow-printed wallpaper. That’s because it’s rumored to be scratch-and-sniff — a rumor that co-owner Charlie Wilcox said he believes originated with first-year students at UC Santa Cruz but one that he cannot confirm or deny. 

When the Beckers first opened Marianne’s, they were seeking a way to put their children through college in the post-war years. They named it after their daughters, Mary and Anne. Lenore made the ice cream, and the whole family helped run the shop. 

Marianne’s changed hands in 1955, but it was the next owners who made the shop the ice cream institution we know today. In 1958, Sam and Dorothy Lieberman took over. Sam was a young businessman from Santa Cruz who had just returned from serving as a dental technician in the Korean War. He had a background in hospitality but no experience with ice cream. 

“He liked to say that the only thing he knew about ice cream when he started was how to eat it,” Wilcox said. 

Sam, whom a Santa Cruz Sentinel reporter in 1997 called a “blue-eyed bear of a man who seems to keep constantly busy,” took to it naturally. In the more than 50 years he ran the shop, he expanded Marianne’s selection of flavors from 13 to 75. Inventing weird and wonderful new flavors became his passion. 

“Sam used to just be struck by inspiration, and a flavor idea would hit him,” Wilcox said. “‘2AM Truffle’ is called that because he woke up at 2 o’clock in the morning and had an idea and wrote it down. He used to keep a notepad next to his bed just in case.”

Marianne’s once served dill pickle ice cream as well as bloody mary ice cream, and still today, it serves slightly off-the-wall flavors like cantaloupe and mandarin chocolate. But the most infamous of the odd flavors was garlic, which Lieberman first developed for a booth at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in 1985, he told the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

“The first time I made it, I got sicker than a dog,” Lieberman told the Sentinel in 1988. “It didn’t take a genius to figure out that a little garlic goes a long way.”

The garlicky vanilla-based ice cream can be found today at a few shops in Gilroy, as well as at San Francisco garlic restaurant the Stinking Rose, but Marianne’s Ice Cream in Santa Cruz doesn’t offer it.

“It’s one of the things that you take a taste, and you either love it or not so much,” Wilcox said. “And the percentage of people who love it is relatively small.”

While Sam developed wacky flavors, Dorothy pitched the Marianne’s brand to local restaurants, offering to create new flavors on request, according to the San Francisco Chronicle (the Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms). Today, Marianne’s ice cream can be found at about 400 scoop shops, restaurants and grocery stores in and around the Bay Area, from Monterey to Marin. 

The Liebermans were in their 80s before they finally retired. In 2012, they sold Marianne’s to Kelly Dillon and Charlie Wilcox. 

The couple had recently moved to Santa Cruz after Dillon was appointed the chief financial officer of a credit union in town. Late after dinner one night, they stopped in for scoops at Marianne’s and were amazed to find the place buzzing with activity. 

“Just randomly the next day, I was kind of Googling around and looking at real estate and came across a listing for Marianne’s being listed for sale,” Wilcox said. “… Nine months later, we had figured out how to make a transition and make everyone happy.”

Sam died a year later. Since taking over, Wilcox and Dillon have honored his legacy, changing almost nothing about Marianne’s.

“We maybe put out a fresh coat of paint here and there, and you know, fixed some things, but generally speaking, the integrity of the recipes and the product is paramount to us,” Wilcox said. 

These days, Marianne’s is just a little more widespread. In 2014, Dillon and Wilcox opened a second location in Aptos, and this July, they debuted Ice Cream on Fair, a new shop in Santa Cruz that serves Marianne’s ice cream and their two other ice cream brands, Polar Bear Ice Cream and Treat Ice Cream. 

That means around 115 flavors to choose from at Ice Cream on Fair, with all the ice cream made on-site. The company is planning a grand opening for later this summer.

Despite all this expansion, Wilcox said he’d never want Marianne’s to become an ice cream brand you find at grocery stores across the country, as that would mean a fundamental change in the quality of the product. 

“We don’t add stabilizers and additives that would allow us to sell or ship it really very far,” he said. “… So, you know when you’re getting any of our ice creams, they’re made locally. They haven’t been sitting on the shelf for a long time.”

It’s the quality of the ice cream — made decadent with 16% butterfat and “something magical about the Santa Cruz air,”  Wilcox said — that has kept people coming back to Marianne’s for 76 years. Alfred Hitchcock was even rumored to be a fan.  

They frequently get asked to cater weddings and funerals, and they often hear from married couples who first met on a date at Marianne’s. Sometimes, Wilcox said, they even see visits from families of four generations, from the great-grandmother who used to go to Marianne’s when she was a kid to the new baby brought in for their first taste of ice cream. 

While Wilcox still thinks he and Dillon have many years left of running Marianne’s to look forward to, he said they hope that “Marianne’s long outlives us.”

“We are really proud to carry on what the Beckers started and Sam picked up and ran with,” Wilcox said. “[We hope] that we find folks who will carry on after us who want to do that. … But in the meantime, we’re really enjoying what we do.”