Chuckster’s gives customers the Inside Scoop

VESTAL — Chuckster’s Family Entertainment Center, a fun park offering mini golf, climbing walls, and other activities, has added a new ice cream shop, called Inside Scoop. It’s the first time the center, which opened in mid-2010, has offered food.

The 600-square-foot ice cream shop, offering homemade artisan gelato, was scheduled to open July 3 at the family entertainment center located at 1915 Vestal Parkway West in Vestal. The shop is next to the first hole of Chuckster’s mini golf course, known for the “world’s longest mini golf hole,” according to the center’s website.

Joe Underwood, co-owner of both Inside Scoop and Chuckster’s, says he began planning the new shop nearly a year ago with help of co-owners, Randy Stutzman and Mark Blasko. According to Underwood, the construction didn’t formally begin until May because the owners needed to wrap up financing arrangements.

Underwood says that customers have requested ice cream and food options since Chuckster’s opened.

“There have just been so many people that asked us, ‘Why don’t you guys have ice cream? Why don’t you have some food?’ “ Underwood says. “We tried to make the ice cream building itself like an attraction and not just a place to get something to eat.”

Underwood and his wife, Debbie, took some classes to prepare for this venture and didn’t want it to be an ordinary ice-cream shop. 

“[Debbie] and I attended some classes at Penn State University and down in North Carolina, ice cream making and manufacturing, and we decided to do our own from scratch, ice cream manufacturing,” Underwood explains. “So we decided we would design the building so that the ice cream would be made kind of right up front, right up close to you in the picture windows. When you walk [in] Inside Scoop, you’ll be able to look in the production room … So you’ll be able to watch the process, and you’ll be able to see us making frozen yogurt [and ice cream].”

In his day job, Underwood works at IBM in Endicott in the field of electronic circuit design. He has worked there since 1977.

Inside Scoop will operate with eight employees, all part-time workers. Jerry Kenhart was the contractor on the new shop, according to Underwood, and Chuckster’s is being leased from Shah Enterprises. Underwood declined to provide revenue numbers for the entertainment center.

In addition to traditional ice-cream and gelato flavors, Inside Scoop offers eccentric options like Make and Baple, a bacon-maple flavored gelato, and Chuckster’s Chunk, Up Chuck, a special flavor for kids made green.

The shop uses the Cattabriga EFFE6 gelato machine, an artisan gelato and ice cream maker, imported from Italy. Inside Scoop is the only shop to produce ice cream with the EFFE6 in all of upstate New York, Underwood contends.

Inside Scoop will have the same hours as Chuckster’s Family Entertainment Center, Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Chuckster’s Family Entertainment Center has another location in Chichester, N.H., a suburb of Concord. Both locations provide many activities for families and kids of all ages to enjoy. The entertainment center in Vestal, which encompasses 440,000 square feet and 10 acres, includes mini golf, aeroball, batting cages, and a 27-foot climbing wall. It also offers shoot-N-shower —a foul-shooting contest under a water sprinkler — and jumpster, an apparatus which allows users to jump, swing, flip, and hop up to 18 feet in the air, according to the center’s website.