Michigan Avenue welcomes bubble tea and ice cream spot

There’s just something about ice cream that makes it hard to eat with a frown.

Jeff McCarroll said he worked a lot of different jobs before helping open Scoop ‘N Chill with Bubble Joy in mid-July, and serving ice cream leads to more smiles than any of them.

There may be some grumps someday who might come in and get a scoop of butter pecan or lemon sorbet, but so far, everyone has been smiling, McCarroll said.

“In here, people say ‘I’m about to have ice cream,’” he said. “And that’s pretty cool.”

The building on East Michigan Avenue, across from Enterprise Rent-A-Car, was formerly a doctor’s office. It was under construction for years — long enough that city inspectors started to talk about how long it had been, said McCarroll, who worked on the building for two years with his business partner.

The building was torn out to the outer walls and rebuilt as a bubble tea shop and ice cream parlor with purple and blue walls and a bonus upstairs dining area.

The bubble tea will be added to the menu as soon as a few weeks from now. The shop will serve real tea, McCarroll said, pulling out a packet of sealed tea leaves from Taiwan.

As for the ice cream, the shop offers 12 flavors from Guernsey Farms, a family dairy farm in Northville.

Guernsey Farms expects the biggest sellers to be chocolate and vanilla, which are steady classics for a reason.

“And we’ve been scooping a lot of the turtle swirl, the Mackinac Island fudge and the cotton candy,” McCarroll said. “The rate at which these things are being scooped down is the rate that people are buying it.”

McCarroll said he and his business partner have been in the waiting phase for so long that he’s just excited to see people stop in, grab their favorite flavor and walk off with a smile.