BACKROADS • APRIL 2022
Page 18
DOUMAR’S BBQ AND ICE CREAM
1919 MONTICELLO AVE, NORFOLK, VA 23517 • 757-627-4163 • doumars.com • Hours: Mon-Sat 9am-11pm When you get ice cream, do you opt for cone or cup? I don’t know about you, but when I order ice cream I tend to get it in a cup, simply because I savor my treat and, more often than not, the ice cream would be melting before it was finished. But, what if you didn’t have that choice? If it weren’t for Mr. Abe Doumar, that’s how life would be today. It was 1904 in St. Louis and the World’s Fair was in progress. Along with all the fun and amusements, there was some scientific wizardry introduced: the x-ray machine, the electric typewriter, telautograph (precursor to the fax machine) and the Poulson telegraphone (to become the telephone answering machine). Not to be overshadowed by science was the debut of several foods: iced tea, hamburgers and hot dogs. While these had existed previously, many visitors had never seen them and, thus, brought them to the forefront. Abe Doumar, a traveling salesman selling paperweights, was one of these visitors. One evening he noticed that an ice cream vendor was closing his stand early as he had run out of paper dishes used for serving to-go orders. Nearby was a vendor cooking up waffle cones on a single-iron waffle maker, served with a dollop of whipped cream. Putting two and two together, Doumar bought a cone, rolled it up and, walking over to the ice cream vendor, topped the rolled waffle with ice cream. The combination of warm sweetness of the waffle with cool ice cream was the start of something beautiful. Abe brought the two vendors together and, for the rest of the fair, he sold ice cream in the world’s first waffle cones. Abe, an immigrant from Damascus, Syria, brought his family to the United States and began the family business. He built a four-iron waffle maker to speed up the process and, in 1905,
