The family behind Lebanon’s merry cream

The name "Alfred Merry Cream" is recognizable to almost anyone in Lebanon of a certain generation. The ice cream shop started as a restaurant before soft-serve ice cream gradually became its main attraction. What began with a single machine eventually grew into a well-known Lebanese brand. This is the story of a family, a flavor, and a promise kept across three generations.

Before it had a name

The business did not begin as an ice cream shop at all. As Fadi Naimeh, the man now at its helm, told The Beiruter, his father's original venture was a restaurant. "At first, it didn't start as the Merry Cream concept," he said. Somewhere along the way, almost as an afterthought, his father introduced soft-serve ice cream to the restaurant's offerings. "He saw that the business had potential in a certain way," Fadi recalled. The elder Naimeh brought in a machine, then a second, and slowly the balance of the business tipped. Eventually, the restaurant closed altogether, and the family's attention turned fully to Merry Cream.

This transformation took place, by Fadi's account, before the 1970s had even ended. By the following decade, the name needed no explanation. "By 1980, he was already well known," Fadi said. "If you simply said 'Alfred Merry Cream,' everyone knew who you were talking about."

At the time, Soft-serve ice cream, so ubiquitous today, was barely known in Lebanon when the Naimeh family began serving it. "Very few people had even heard of the idea of Merry Cream or soft serve when it first started," Fadi noted. His father, in effect, introduced an entire concept to a country that had never tasted it.

A decade of silence

The Naimeh business reached a turning point in 2010, when Fadi's father passed away. What followed was not a temporary shutdown. "There wasn't a specific reason, directly speaking," Fadi explained. "It's just that my brother and I had each become occupied with our own work." He had, by then, built a career in the automotive industry. “There wasn't a deliberate decision to shut it down. It just stopped." Still, pressed on the matter, he concedes the truth beneath the practical explanations, "Perhaps the direct reason was my father's death."

For nearly ten years, the shop that had once been synonymous with soft-serve in Lebanon sat rented out to other tenants. Fadi returned briefly in 2018, dipping a toe back into the business "but not in a very big way." It was only last December that he decided the moment had come to do it properly. "I decided that enough was enough. I needed to bring this business back and give it the attention it deserved." Four months ago, in April, the family reopened its doors in, in a new location but under the same beloved name.

Three generations build together

Today, the business carries the imprint of three generations, Alfred the founder, his son Fadi, and now Fadi's own son, Alfred Jr. "A lot of things have changed since my father's time. Almost everything has evolved," Fadi said. Where his father relied on word of mouth, the occasional radio spot, or a television advertisement, the business now lives largely online. "Back then, my father didn't have social media," Fadi explained. "Now, imagine how much things have changed with social media being in everyone's hands." The family has embraced that shift while working to preserve what made the original beloved in the first place.

Loyalty, in a word

Characterize his relationship with customers built over time, Fadi reaches for a single word, loyalty. "The customers are very loyal," he said, describing patrons who seek out Merry Cream even after years abroad. "There are even people who live abroad, and whenever they come back from abroad, they visit. Now that we've reopened, everyone is coming back to us again."

The hardest part, according to Fadi, was the decision to return after a decade of silence, with no guarantee of what awaited. "It was a big challenge for us to return after ten years without knowing... We didn't know what the result would be."

Carrying the vow forward

Perhaps the most striking moment of the conversation comes when Fadi is asked what it means to carry his father's legacy forward alongside his own children. His answer resists easy translation, but its weight is unmistakable. "I consider it as if I fulfilled a vow," he said. "I feel as though it was almost entrusted to me to continue this business, or this mission, if you want to call it that, on behalf of my father." He hopes, in time, that his two sons will do the same, joining him, in a business that has outlasted restaurants, recessions, and a full ten years of silence.

More than fifty years after a single soft-serve machine was added to a small restaurant in Zalka almost as an experiment, the name Merry Cream still carries the same recognition it earned in 1980. It is, in the truest sense, a family’s story.