It was the dead of winter and Rick Hosman and his business partner and husband Kurt Hosman were brain storming plans for signage for the new ice cream shop they envisioned for 6 Rogers St., a small retail space they’d been using for storage for Drift, the Main Street restaurant they owned upstairs.
They already had the name, Nauti (as in Nautical) and cone (as in ice cream) and they already had a mascot — a salty little cartoon sailor named Nauti. Now they needed some way of getting passing traffic and foot traffic to realize they were there, tucked away almost invisibly in a corner of a strip mall in what is Gloucester’s busiest waterfront tourist thoroughfare.
“We wanted something beachy that screamed summer and New England and vacation and family and fun,” Kurt Hosman told the Times. “Something big and Instagrammable, a photo op that would give people fun pictures to remember Gloucester by. At first we thought of a giant whale tail and then we came up with the chair.”
And what a chair it is. A giant, classic, white Adirondack chair sitting right out there off Rogers Street bearing the Nauti Sailor logo and an invitation to “Be Nauti. Eat Ice Cream”
On a recent hot Saturday afternoon, that’s exactly what dozens of people were lined up to do, all eyes locked on the 30 flavors of Richardson’s ice cream listed on the window, while over on the chair, whole families, dogs included, posed for pictures and licked their cones.
Giant Adirondack chairs aren’t that easy to come by, so to make the chair a reality in time for the shop’s grand opening during St. Peter’s Fiesta, the partners called in Jason Ilges – a local contractor who’d worked with them on renovating their restaurant Drift.
“Up at Drift, a lot of our customers would ask us where they could get ice cream in Gloucester,” Kurt said. “We knew the shops were out there but they didn’t seem to catch peoples’ eyes.”
Nauti Cone will.
The shop, which also has a big banner “screaming ice cream,” is the latest business venture for the partners. In the nine years since they opened Drift at 3 Main St., they have more than doubled its size, totally transformed its interior and replaced the entire wall facing the harbor with glass windows that open like doors in the summer to let the sea air in and create an elevated view of the working waterfront.
They also developed a reputation for killer cocktails and espresso martinis, a whopping 12,000 of which were sold last year, they said.
Both men had long successful careers in the hospitality industry — Kurt Hosman playing an integral role in the rollout of Gloucester’s Beauport Hotel. In an email to the Times, he said, “Gloucester has supported us for many years, and we’re excited to continue investing in the city… The Nauti Cone looks forward to supporting summer events… As we celebrate our first season, a portion of sales will be donated to support Gloucester’s Fourth of July Celebrations.”
The Nauti Cone’s window is open daily through summer from noon to 10 p.m. And, by the way, if ice cream isn’t your thing, it also serves fruit sorbets.