The ice cream truck Long Island grew up chasing down the block is getting an address in Coram. On September 4, Mister Softee opens its fifth Long Island storefront at 2229 Route 112, Unit F, in Pond Plaza, taking over the space that until recently held Milky Ways Ice Cream and Cereal Bar. The counter will carry 44 flavors of soft serve and hard ice cream, and unlike the truck, it will still be there in January.

A third generation behind the counter

The shop belongs to siblings Antonio and John Guler, and the family connection to the brand runs deeper than a franchise agreement. Their grandfather was one of Mister Softee's original truck franchisees, starting in 1968, and by the family's own count they have now been a Mister Softee franchise family for 57 years and counting. The grandchildren grew up around the trucks, and last year they opened the family's first walk-in shop in Center Moriches.

Coram is their next step, and it is a fitting piece of ground for it. Route 112 through Coram is one of the corridors where the trucks have worked for generations, and the new shop puts the swirl cone on the same road with a door, a dining counter and winter hours.

What a storefront does that a truck cannot

Mister Softee has been a truck company almost its entire life. It began selling soft serve from trucks in 1956, and for nearly seventy years the deal was simple: the truck comes to you, in summer, until the light fades. The storefronts flip all of that. They stay open year round, they scoop hard ice cream alongside the soft serve the trucks are known for, and they carry flavors and menu items the trucks never had room for.

The first Mister Softee brick-and-mortar shop anywhere opened in East Islip in March 2025, run by a longtime truck operator, and it made the case for the model: pistachio and strawberry soft serve that the trucks do not carry, scooped ice cream, waffle cones, and a line out the door in months when every truck on the Island is parked for the season. Shops in Center Moriches, Oakdale and Miller Place followed. Coram makes five, all of them in Suffolk County, all opened inside about a year and a half.

The space it fills

Pond Plaza sits on Route 112 in Coram, and the unit Mister Softee is taking was most recently Milky Ways, the ice cream and cereal bar that has since closed. A shopping center losing an independent ice cream shop and gaining a national name is usually a mixed trade, but this one comes with an unusual amount of local history attached, because the name over the door is one almost every reader of this sentence has chased down a street on foot.

That is the real asset here, and the family behind the Coram shop seems to know it. Mister Softee's jingle is one of the few pieces of sound that works on three generations of Long Islanders at once. The trucks made the brand, and the trucks are not going anywhere. The shop just means the season never has to end.

What to expect on opening day

The shop opens Friday, September 4. Expect the classics the trucks built the name on, dipped cones, sundaes and milkshakes, plus the storefront extras: 44 flavors across the soft serve machines and the hard ice cream case, more than any truck ever carried.

For Coram, the practical change is simple. The soft serve cone that used to depend on a truck's schedule and a summer month now has a fixed address on Route 112, all year. The jingle finally parked.