#First Big Gay Ice Cream store closes in East Village

The coronavirus pandemic has iced out Big Gay Ice Cream.

The iconic company’s first store, located at 125 E. 7th St., has permanently closed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, according to East Village site EV Grieve, which broke the news Thursday.

The shop was started in 2011 by co-founders Doug Quint and Bryan Petroff as a brick-and-mortar offshoot of the popular food truck, which was known for quirky ice cream flavors such as Cheat-Oh (cheese-flavored soft-serve rolled in crushed Cheetos) and off-beat toppings like smoky bacon and crushed wasabi peas.

“With great sadness but with no regrets, Bryan and I decided that the time came for Big Gay Ice Cream to close our East Village location,” Quint said in a statement to EV Grieve on Friday. He added that the store solidified the business into “more than just our overblown hobby,” he said, noting that “the batteries have gone a bit dim” in that area since the COVID-19 shutdown earlier last year.

Quint added that without being able to “jam” customers in over the coming summer of 2021, the shop “would never truly recover” from lost revenue.

“For a decade the shop hummed along and put tens of thousands of Salty Pimps in the hands of folks from Tierra Del Fuego to Lapland,” he added, referring to one of their most iconic — and cheekily-named — flavor combos. “It made many people, including us, very happy.”

The company itself was started in 2009, when Quint told The Post that “ice cream trucks are the gayest thing.”

“They are queer and bright and colored, and I thought, why don’t I take the ice cream truck out of the closet and let it come screaming down the street?” he said.

Its success led to the establishment of store locations, including in the East Village. Despite the COVID crisis, Big Gay Ice Cream has been able to maintain stores in the West Village and on the Upper West Side. Quint said they plan to “keep on keeping on” at those shops and “hope to open another East Village or Lower East Side location before too long,” adding, “Goodbye East Seventh. So long and thanks for all the calories.”