The best ice-cream you've never had is at a pop-up in northern NSW

Sydney Morning Herald

25-07-2025

In the world of ice-cream vendors, there are a few main camps. Creamy, aerated cups and cones from your local parlour. Dense, intensely flavoured scoops from neighbourhood gelaterias. Then there's restaurant ice-cream, an entirely alt genre where chefs make the bases in wild proportions, dial down the sugar, freeze hard, then spin to order.
For whatever reason – scale, convenience – these restaurant techniques have rarely crossed over into shopfronts. But in sleepy Brunswick Heads, Bush Ice-Creamery, a two-day-a-week pop-up run out of local cafe Daily Counter, is bridging the divide. The result might just be the state's best ice-cream.
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Roll up on Fridays or Saturdays and Wal Foster is in residence. He'll scoop Ooray plum pie ice-cream onto a miso cookie, top it with pepperberry meringue, blowtorch it, then finish it with an Atherton raspberry. He'll spoon orange jelly into a cup with Jersey-milk ice-cream and cap it with whipped cultured cream. He'll drizzle hot rice pudding with spiced brown butter and serve it with an orb of warming galangal ice-cream.
A Pillar Valley boy, Foster apprenticed at Aria before embarking on a cooking career that took him to Melbourne and through Europe, where he opened Drangen restaurant in Sweden. The dessert work there shifted Foster's palate from savoury to sweet but he missed home, so after 6½ years away he moved back.