Beamz, a new ice cream shop from LGS Studio’s Noel Hennessy, has landed in the Arts District. The design-forward scoop shop opened at the end of September with California-inspired ice cream and sorbet made in-house on an Italian Bravo Trittico, plus sodas
and floats.
Born and raised in Washington, Hennessy grew up working in bakeries and cafes. After graduating high school, he moved to Seattle and worked as a barista at a street cart during the ’90s coffee boom, then relocated to Boston to study photography, sculpture, and painting. With a degree under his belt, Hennessy headed to New York and joined Borgo, the lauded Manhattan restaurant operated by Andrew Tarlow, of Diner and Marlow & Sons fame. “From that family of people, I learned so much about service, food, and wine,” Hennessy says. After Borgo, Hennessy worked at Cafe Gitane, and eventually opened his own restaurant, St. Helen Cafe, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
“It was a total homespun project,” Hennessy says of St. Helen Cafe. “I was very young and ambitious at the time — I was 23 years old.” Armed with a one-page business plan, he found an investor and opened the cafe in a tight storefront that used to be a home. (The space now houses Bakeri.) While St. Helen lacked a real kitchen and was limited to eight tables, it became a neighborhood standby for coffee, cinnamon toast, and eggs. In 2009, Hennessy closed the cafe and relocated to Los Angeles to focus on his work as an artist. Five years later, Hennessy founded his design and ceramics studio, LGS Studio, out of a garage with co-founder Thomas Renaud. Over the years, the idea of getting back into the food world took hold in the back of his mind. “I always thought I would do something again,” Hennessy says. “Ice cream has been the love of my life. It just was always my number one dessert, my favorite thing to eat, my passion.”
The years Hennessy spent developing ice cream flavors inspired by his California surroundings have produced scoops such as olive oil and salted caramel; date cake and passion fruit toffee with a cinnamon ice cream base; vanilla jasmine-rice pudding; and chocolate pistachio butter crunch with rivers of pistachio butter. Sorbets include passionfruit, mango, and chile lime; chocolate-orange; guava; and green apple-star anise. Beamz also serves a handful of sodas, including botanical colas infused with vanilla bean and bay leaf, cherry and rosemary, and passionfruit. Guests can also order sodas as floats with a scoop of ice cream or sorbet. Hennessy plans to rotate the flavors as he experiments with ingredients, but he will keep some guest favorites on the menu consistently. “There’s a million flavors I want to do,” he says. “But we also want people to have those flavors that they want.” Beamz offers pints packed on-site and will soon roll out ice cream sandwiches.
Leaning into his art background, Hennessy took inspiration for Beamz’s sun logo and typeface from paraphernalia sourced from the World’s Fair held in Spokane in 1974 and from Los Angeles’s terroir. “I wanted it to feel new-nostalgic,” Hennessy says. “I wanted to do something new, but I wanted it to be rooted in nature and this love for California.” A ceramic installation cast with impressions of date fronds and passionfruit blossoms from LGS Studio acts as the counter, while pendant lights inspired by the California poppy hang overhead. “I wanted it to feel like kind of a fantasy: What does a bee’s house look like?” Hennessy says. All of the ice cream and sorbet is held in lidded, stainless-steel Italian pozzetti, which help retain ideal texture and temperature.
Hennessy hopes that Beamz will expand beyond its initial Arts District location and find other pockets of Los Angeles to call home. “I’ve planted the seed that this can grow into a few little things around the city, and each one is designed with this intent that feels unique to that space, but still our aesthetic,” he says. “I think that would be a goal of ours.”
