Doughnuts, soft serve, and coffee come together at South Jersey’s latest cafe

Tyler Gerber loved growing up in Medford in the 1990s and early ’00s. But for all its suburban charm, “Medford didn’t really have a lot of places people could attach themselves to and be proud of,” he said.

On Jan. 23, Gerber, 32, marks the grand opening of Happy Place Homemade, a bright, modern shop designed around the daily rhythms of the Burlington County town. Set up in a former Bank of America branch on Route 70 — including the drive-through — it serves coffee and scratch-made doughnuts in the morning, and adds soft serve and shakes in the afternoon and evening. There’s seating in booths along the front windows.

“We’re trying to create a fun, unique experience for the town,” said Gerber, who moved to Philadelphia after his Shawnee High graduation to study entrepreneurship and financial planning at St. Joseph’s University.

Combining seemingly disparate food product lines — Federal Donuts & Chicken comes to mind — is not new. “But it hasn’t been done around here,” Gerber said. “We call it ‘new nostalgia.’ We want to build a place people remember — a spot they come back to 10 or 20 years from now and say, ‘Oh, my God, Happy Place.’”

At first, Gerber said, “we were going to be a straight soft-serve shop. But the challenge around here is that most ice cream places aren’t open year-round. We wanted to build something that could be sustainable all year, so we started thinking about what paired naturally with soft serve. Hot and cold just makes sense. That’s where doughnuts come in.”

And where there are doughnuts, there is drip coffee — in this case, from La Colombe. Gerber makes his own syrups to flavor coffee drinks and soft serve.

Gerber bought a country-fair-style Belshaw cake-doughnut machine with a glass front to let customers watch the process from the first drop of batter to the roll-out of the finished doughnut. Batter is mixed in-house and temperature-controlled before being fried, cooled, glazed while warm, and displayed in the nearby case.

The soft serve is spun into a dense, low-air product that tastes creamier than even most ice cream, even though at 9% butterfat it is not “ice cream” by industry standards.

“We aim for about 40% overrun,” he said, referring to the percentage of air whipped into the mix during freezing. (Super-premium ice creams’ overruns are about 50% and lower, while premium brands range between 60% and 90%.)

The doughnut-and-ice cream combination led to one of the shop’s signature creations: Happy Stacks — a doughnut sandwiched by soft serve, served in a cup, with toppings and a syrup drizzle.

There are also soft-serve parfaits (“Perfects,” he calls them), doughnut soft-serve sandwiches (“Donut Dandies”), and nondairy, fruit-based iced drinks (“HomeADE”).

Although Gerber doesn’t come from a traditional restaurant background, he says his strength is creation. “I love to cook. I’ve been experimenting my whole life,” he said.

“He goes 100% into everything,” said his father, Larry, who sold his concrete business several years ago and is helping him with the business. “Sports, school, business — he’s a perfectionist. This whole concept came out of his imagination.”

Tyler Gerber said he was making a long-term bet on his hometown.

“We’re not just popping up,” he said. “We’re building a brand. We’re building an experience. And hopefully, we’re building something that Medford can call its own.”