Wallingford welcomes Indigo Cow, Seattle’s first Hokkaido-style soft serve shop

When Keisuke Kobayashi first came to Seattle, he was looking around town for his favorite dessert. “I’ve tried soft serve in a lot of places,” recalls the owner of Wallingford’s (phenomenally underrated) Yoroshiku. “I couldn’t find my favorite.” None of them tasted like the rich, creamy, famous Hokkaido soft ice cream from his home prefecture in Japan, which he missed so much.

This month, 15 years after arriving in the US, Kobayashi opened what he believed to be the first Hokkaido-style soft serve store in the US, Indigo Cow.

“Every time I took a bite of the soft ice cream, all my worries disappeared and I became very happy,” says Kobayashi of his childhood in Japan. He wanted to share that with his friends in the USA

The store opened right in Yoroshiku last week, and despite the cool weather in early fall, it attracted long lines and large crowds.

Tucked away in a corner of the restaurant, customers order from a window that slides open onto the street. Inside, the ice cream parlor stands out from the rest of the restaurant with an indigo-colored wall, interrupted by a cow in the middle and the words “Straight from Hokkaido” underneath. But even the label is generous: it’s little more than a couple of low fridges and a single soft ice cream machine.

At the moment, Indigo Cow only serves one flavor – Hokkaido milk – though Kobayashi plans to add rotating monthly specialty flavors to the menu soon, including matcha, black sesame, and yuzu. But at the beginning he wanted to show his confidence in the great Hokkaido milk and let it stand for itself. Or at least alone with a few topping options.

Hokkaido is Japan’s dairy region, and their famous whole milk produces the tangy dessert that Kobayashi describes as “tasting like milk” in particular. In the US, he found the milk flavor to be absent and found that the soft serve often only tasted like added vanilla and left a buttery, sugary feel in the mouth rather than the smooth, clean, naturally sweet flavors of the Hokkaido style.

After opening Yoroshiku in 2012 and expanding it a few years later, Kobayashi felt confident that Seattle’s customers knew Japanese food, missed even hyper-regional products like this, and that selling the premium soft serve would be good business. All he needed to start his dream dessert shop was a supplier of this incredible Hokkaido milk.

“I didn’t know how hard it was going to be,” he says when he started making his plans. None of his meetings with Japanese vendors produced someone willing to jump through the hoops required to import Hokkaido milk and soft ice cream mix to the United States, and he couldn’t get the taste without it. During a trip there in 2019, he finally found a company willing to work with an importer to get FDA approval for its soft serve mix – a process that took nearly two years.

Iwase has been run by the same family for more than 100 years, raising more than 200 cows in Hokkaido pastures and milking them on site for maximum freshness. The farm is famous in Japan for its ice cream and is used by other shops in the area. The Prepared Indigo Cow Mix combines milk, cream, and condensed milk from grass-fed cows to create the thick swirls that Indigo Cow serves in cups, sachets, or gluten-free sachets and in small, regular, and large sizes.

With just the single flavor, the only real choice on the window is to add a topping. The homemade fruits are currently blueberry and strawberry and will change seasonally, while the dark chocolate wall uses Theo Chocolate. But for a full Japanese experience, try the Shiratama Kuromitsu Kinako – a classic mix of chewy mochi, brown sugar syrup, and toasted soybean powder.

But even these rubbers, says Kobayashi, are extras. “We trust how great Hokkaido milk is,” and the point of Indigo Cow is to show that taste: “No vanilla flavor, just 100% milk.”

Find Indigo Cow in Yoroshiku at 1911 N. 45th St. in Wallingford; open from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., Wednesday to Monday.