Jackie Cuscuna and Brian Smith outside of their new shop, which opens to the public next week.
Photo: Courtesy of the subjects
For Jackie Cuscuna, every trip to the grocery store is a reminder of her former life. “I walk by the first Ample Hills every day to go to the supermarket, and it hurts,” she says. Cuscuna, the co-founder of that Brooklyn ice-cream company that she and her husband, Brian Smith, bankrupted once and lost twice, adds, “It doesn’t go away, but the desire to do it again and to build a business again the right way, I think, is there.”
The couple is doing it again, starting over one more time. And they’re betting the farm on chicken. Chicken burgers, specifically. Ramblin’ Chick opens next week in Carroll Gardens, and even the biggest fan of comeback stories will find its opening to be, at the very least, somewhat implausible.
Like child actors forced to grow up on camera, Cuscuna and Smith became national figures while they were still bootstrapped first-time business owners. Ample Hills, which they launched as a single Vanderbilt Avenue storefront in 2011, simply took off on the strength of flavors like Snap Mallow Pop and Ooey Gooey Butter Cake. By 2015, they were signed on for Disney collaborations — official Star Wars flavors and a Disney World shop — and Oprah Winfrey had said publicly she could polish off a pint of Ample Hills ice cream in a single sitting.
Cuscuna and Smith took on outside investment and grew too fast. “We didn’t fail because people stopped liking the ice cream,” Smith says. Where he came up short was on the math. They built a $7 million factory and had to keep growing in order to pay for it, but they didn’t have the capital to open more stores. “All the 15 shops were profitable, but the factory’s drag on the 15 shops was so great and so immediate that we declared bankruptcy,” Smith says. Cutting costs wasn’t an option, either, because they needed to grow. “We couldn’t close the factory because it was the only way we had to make ice cream,” Smith explains. “The only way to do it was to immediately build ten more shops, but the investors didn’t have ten-shops-more money.” (They also made some avoidable mistakes, like insisting on packing ice cream into square-shaped pints called squints that were more difficult to fill and transport.)
In 2020, an Oregon-based manufacturing company called Schmitt Industries was able to buy Ample Hills for just $1 million. A few months later, Cuscuna and Smith declared personal bankruptcy. Then, they dusted themselves off and in 2021 opened a new shop, the Social in Prospect Heights. Sales were sluggish, but they chugged along until learning that four of the Ample Hills outposts in New York City were back on the market, including the original on Vanderbilt Avenue.
In what looked like triumphant and poetic justice, the couple purchased their former shops back in 2023, along with the rights to their recipes and to Ample Hills’ social-media account. For a moment, they’d reclaimed ownership of the brand they’d built. But within six months, the investors who’d backed them on the deal fired the duo from their business; Smith and Cuscuna later claimed they hadn’t hired a lawyer to look over the details of the arrangement. “I beat myself up a lot,” Cuscuna says. “I felt like I did everything wrong. I mean, it was torture. I’m still going through it.”
It’s not only that the loss continues to haunt them; it’s as if they’ve been compelled by a force greater than themselves to keep restarting until they get it right. They also need to dig themselves out of a financial hole. “Even though Ample Hills had grown to a certain place, we still held many personal guarantees,” Smith says. “We still have debt from the personal bankruptcy.” So here they are with Ramblin’ Chick, a business that aims to marry America’s love of chicken and burgers, whose mascot is a cartoon hen, a wanderer of the land, blue guitar strapped to her shoulder, red boots on her feet. She’s a stand-in for Woody Guthrie and the communal spirit of folk music. Understandably, investors were hesitant and needed assurance that, as Smith says, “we were up for a smaller growth plan or more focus on profitability — all of the things that we knew we needed to do.” They managed to find a few backers who believed in what they’d initially built with Ample Hills.
One thing that has not changed since the Ample Hills days is Smith’s boundless faith in his product-development skills. He believes he’s struck gold again with his chicken burgers — seasoned, marinated patties that inspired the shop’s slogan: “In search of the great American burger.”
Each of Ramblin’s five different Cracklin’ Chicken Smash Burgers is a double-patty production on a Martin’s potato roll. The OG BK is piled with caramelized onions, American cheese, and Smith’s Secret Ramblin’ Sauce (his version of comeback sauce). There’s a chicken Caesar in burger form (like a wrap, but not); a Buffalo-wing-adjacent stacker; a chicken-and-waffles tower with no buns; and finally, a chicken-chili burger. You can also get the chili over the skin-on fries, or those can be ordered with molten cheddar or a magic dust made with crispy chicken skin.
There are nuggets, modeled after the McDonald’s ideal — “Something that resonated in your mythic imagination,” Smith says, but “made with real ingredients” — and Ooey Gooey Mac & Cheese, a triple-cheese affair crowned with a crumble of potato chips and pretzels. The name is an intentional throwback to Oprah’s favorite Ample Hills flavor, and it’s not the only reference point. Late last week, Smith was testing a batch of vanilla soft serve. Yes, they’re doing ice cream again, and Smith is going hard on soda-fountain-style drinks. He’s got shakes and he’s got floats, and he’s seeing just how far he can take them. “We have a banana-pudding milkshake I’m trying to work on where we’ll purée bananas and vanilla wafers into the milkshake,” he says. The soft serve is a certified home run: as rich and dense as anything made with custard. “I mean, there’s just no way that we couldn’t do ice cream,” says Cuscuna.
Beyond the ice cream, the real detail that unites this new venture with Ample Hills is the couple’s apparent belief in some kind of higher calling. The ice-cream shop took its name from a line in a Walt Whitman poem. Ramblin’ Chick was inspired by “This Land Is Your Land.” “I know we’re just a chicken-burger place,” Smith says. “That song is really provocative and really progressive, and yet it’s something that every kid grows up still knowing — it’s also tied in with the whole history of the American hamburger as being a food of the people.”
This story has been updated to clarify the terms of Ample Hills’ purchase by Schmitt Industries.
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