CLEVELAND — For brothers Pete and Mike Mitchell, ice cream is a treat that evokes happy memories.
"It's a strange thing - it follows us through our lives from when we were young kids all the way up until we're on a bus full of senior citizens coming for a treat. [It's for] after happy times in our life, always happy, after a ball game or with after a graduation, or with Grandma, or with your friends on a date, those are always the associations of ice cream," said Mike Mitchell during a recent conversation with 3News' Russ Mitchell.
Pete and Mike are the co-founders of Mitchell's Homemade Ice Cream, and they've been helping Clevelanders have those happy associations for two decades now. Today, Mitchell's may be one of Northeast Ohio's best-known brands, but it all started with two brothers who simply wanted some ice cream.
The University Heights natives dreamed up the idea of opening an ice cream shop while on the other side of the country.
In the late 1990's Mike Mitchell was finishing up a degree in Philosophy at Ohio State when he took a trip to visit his older brother Pete, who was working for Key Bank in Seattle.
"I went and visited him and we were looking for a good ice cream... and there wasn't any and we both looked at each other and there was this moment of, let's make ice cream, let's do this together," Mike recalled.
After briefly considering planting roots on the west coast, the brothers decided there's no place as sweet as home.
"[Seattle] felt awfully far from home. Our family was in Cleveland our connections are in Cleveland, our love was for home city," said Pete.
And Cleveland has showed the brothers a lot of love as well. Mitchell's Ice Cream now boasts ten locations since they opened their first storefront in Westlake in 1999.
So what's the recipe for success? The Mitchell's say it's all about family values.
"Treat people well," Pete explained. "When I say people, I mean... guests, of course...[and that] goes hand in hand with you know with treating the people who contribute in the shops in the kitchen exceptionally well too."
"One more relationship which is special to me is working with my brother every day," Mike told Russ.
So after two decades and countless scoops, we had to ask - do the Mitchell's ever get sick of ice cream?
"I enjoy it as much today as I did when we made our first batch," Pete says. And as for Mike? He told us, "The more of it you have the more of it you want."