Duluth gets roughly ninety inches of snow a year and takes its ice cream seriously anyway, which is either a contradiction or the entire personality of the place, depending on how long you have lived here. Three of the four shops below are open in February.
Here is where to go, what each one actually is, and which ones you cannot get to in the winter.
A note on method. We have not eaten our way through every flavor and we are not going to pretend we have. No star ratings here and no invented visits. These are editorial picks based on reputation, longevity, awards on the public record, and standing in the local conversation. What we did verify: every shop below is open, at the address given, with the hours stated, confirmed from its own website in August 2026.
1. Love Creamery
1908 West Superior Street, Lincoln Park, and 366 South Lake Avenue, Canal Park. Both daily 10am to 10pm, year round.
The one with the medal. Love Creamery took the Star Tribune's Minnesota Best 2025 gold for frozen treat and ice cream, a statewide award in a state that is not short of ice cream, plus a 2025 Reader People's Choice. It is the closest thing the Twin Ports has to a nationally legible food business.
The Lincoln Park shop is the flagship and the creamery itself, the place where new flavors get developed and tested, which makes it the one to visit if you care about that. It is also a good measure of what has happened to the Lincoln Park Craft District in a decade: this is a neighborhood that had almost no reason for an outsider to stop in 2014 and now has a brewery row, a smokehouse, a smash burger house and a gold-medal creamery inside a few blocks of West Superior Street.
The Canal Park shop is the practical one for visitors, a block off the Lakewalk, open until 10pm every night including Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day, which is exactly when you want an ice cream shop to be open in Canal Park.
The line runs dairy and vegan alongside each other, and the cakes come in dairy-free and gluten-free versions. The third scoop shop is across the bridge at 2704 North 21st Street in Superior, in Billings Park, the newest of the three and also open year round. Its own page publishes two different closing times, so check that one before a special trip.
2. Crank and Dasher
The Lakeside business block on East Superior Street, and Fitger's Courtyard at 600 East Superior Street.
The handmade one, and now in two places. Crank and Dasher makes its ice cream and confections in small batches, sells pints, and does wedding cakes and event ice cream bars, and the flavor board follows the season closely enough that a local summer strawberry shows up when local summer strawberries do.
The original sits in the middle of the Lakeside block between 44th and 47th Avenue East, the most genuinely walkable neighborhood strip in the city, next door to coffee and a few doors from pizza and hardware. Hours there run Sunday to Thursday noon to 6pm and Friday to Saturday noon to 8pm.
The second location is in the Fitger's Courtyard at 600 East Superior Street, on the lake side of the old brewery complex between downtown and the East End, open Monday to Thursday noon to 8pm and Friday to Sunday noon to 9pm. That one is the after-dinner stop if you are already on the Lakewalk.
3. The Scoop on 47th
714 North 47th Avenue East, Duluth.
The neighborhood one, and the strangest business on this list in the best way: The Scoop on 47th is half ice cream counter, half antique and media shop. You go for a cone and leave with a record.
It sits just up 47th Avenue East from the Lakeside block, which means Lakeside and Lester Park households have two independent ice cream options inside a few hundred yards of each other, a genuinely unusual amenity for a residential neighborhood five miles from downtown. If you are weighing the east side against the hill, this is one of the small things that makes the east side feel like a village rather than a subdivision.
Open Sunday 1pm to 7pm, Monday to Thursday noon to 7pm, Friday and Saturday noon to 8pm.
4. Gordy's Hi-Hat, Cloquet, for the malt
415 Sunnyside Drive, Cloquet. Daily 10am to 8pm in season.
Not a scoop shop and not in Duluth, and it belongs here anyway, because Gordy's fresh-blended malts are the regional benchmark for the form. It is a walk-up drive-in that has been run by the same family since 1960, twenty-five minutes southwest down I-35, and the malt is what people order after the hand-pattied burger and the homemade onion rings.
It is seasonal. Gordy's closes for the winter and reopens in spring, and opening day is reported as local news in Carlton County. If you are looking at houses in Cloquet, Esko or Carlton, the Hi-Hat's reopening is roughly the date your future neighbors agree winter is over.
What we left off, and why
PortLand Malt Shoppe: do not make the trip. The seasonal malt stand on the Lakewalk was a genuine Duluth institution, and its website is still up, still describing a May-to-September season. Current business listings mark it closed, and we could not confirm from any source that it is operating. A live website is not evidence of a live business, which is worth remembering generally in this region: a lapsed operation's site can sit online for years. We are not sending anyone there.
This is exactly the failure mode this guide exists to prevent, and we nearly published the other way ourselves. An earlier version of this article told you to go and check first, on the strength of the season dates its own site advertises. That would have sent you to a closed door.
Everything else with a soft-serve machine. There are more places in the Twin Ports that will sell you a cone than there are places that make ice cream, and this list is about the second category plus one malt. That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight.
The winter question
This is the part that actually matters if you are moving here rather than visiting.
Three of the four businesses above run year round. Love Creamery keeps all three scoop shops open through the winter, including the Superior one, Crank and Dasher runs both locations, and The Scoop on 47th posts year-round hours. What closes is the walk-up and drive-in end of the market: Gordy's and most of the seasonal counters up the shore.
It is a small thing that says something real about the city. Duluth does not shut down for winter; it changes shape. The businesses that survive here are the ones that built a January plan, and the ones that did not are the ones you find boarded up in a guidebook from three years ago. That is the same reason every restaurant on this site gets its hours re-checked before we publish them.
For the rest of the meal, see where to get breakfast in Duluth, the best burgers in the Twin Ports and the best pizza in Superior.