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

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

This month, 15 years after arriving in the U.S., Kobayashi opened what he believes to be the first Hokkaido-style soft serve shop in the U.S., Indigo Cow.

“Every time I took a bite of the soft serve, all of my worries melted away and I became very happy,” Kobayashi says of growing up eating it in Japan. Now, he wanted to share that with his friends in the U.S.

The shop opened last week, just inside Yoroshiku, and drew long lines and big crowds despite the chilly weather of early fall.

Tucked into a corner of the restaurant, customers order from a window that slides open to the street. Within, an indigo-colored wall makes the ice cream shop stand out from the rest of the restaurant, punctuated by a cow in the center and the words “Straight from Hokkaido” below it. But even calling it a shop is generous: it’s not much more than a few low refrigerators and a single soft serve machine.

Right now, Indigo Cow serves just a single flavor – Hokkaido milk – though Kobayashi plans to add rotating monthly special flavors to the menu soon, including matcha, black sesame, and yuzu. But to start, he wanted to show his confidence in how great Hokkaido milk is and let it stand alone. Or, at least alone with a few topping options.

Hokkaido is Japan’s dairy region, and their famous whole milk produces the flavorful dessert, which Kobayashi describes as – most importantly – “tasting like milk.” In the U.S., he found that dairy flavor lacking, noticing that soft serve often tasted just of added vanilla, and left a buttery, sugary feeling in his mouth, rather than the smooth, clean, naturally sweet flavors of Hokkaido-style.

Having opened Yoroshiku in 2012, then expanded 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 a good business. All he needed to create his dream dessert shop was a supplier of that incredible Hokkaido milk.

“I didn’t know how hard it would be,” he says of when he began to hatch his plans. None of his meetings with Japanese vendors yielded anyone willing to jump through the hoops required to import Hokkaido-milk soft serve mix into the United States, and he couldn’t get the flavor without it. Finally, while on a trip there in 2019, he found a company willing to work with an importer to get FDA approval for their soft serve mix – a process that took nearly two years.

Run by the same family for more than 100 years, Iwase raises more than 200 cows in the pastures of Hokkaido, milking them on site for maximum freshness. The farm is famous within Japan for their ice cream and it is used by other shops in the region. The prepared mix for Indigo Cow combines milk, cream, and condensed milk from grass-fed cows to create the thick swirls, which Indigo cow serves in cups, cones, or gluten-free cones, and in small, regular, and large sizes.

With just the single flavor, the only real choice at the window is to add a topping. The house-made fruit ones are currently blueberry and strawberry and will change seasonally, while the dark chocolate “wall” uses Theo Chocolate. But to get a full Japanese experience, try the shiratama kuromitsu kinako – a classic mixture of chewy mochi, brown sugar syrup, and roasted soybean powder.

But even those toppings, Kobayashi says, are extras. “We have confidence in how great Hokkaido milk is,” and the point of Indigo Cow is to show off that flavor: “No vanilla flavor, just 100% milk.”

Find Indigo Cow inside Yoroshiku at 1911 N. 45^th St. in Wallingford; open from 3 p.m.-9 pm, Wednesday through Sunday.

Editor's note: Due to a limited supply and large demand, the shop is currently limiting its servings to 300 a day.