Soft serve gets underestimated. People walk past it for scooped ice cream, for artisan gelato, for whatever’s in a waffle cone at the fancier place down the block. Ritter’s Curl Bar, on Commercial Street in downtown Salem, is the argument that soft serve deserves more credit — and that the execution matters as much as the concept.
The shop is small. You order at a counter, you watch them pull the curl, and you either eat it standing outside or find one of the few seats nearby. That’s it. There’s no elaborate backstory on the menu board, no farm-to-cone sourcing paragraph. What there is: a rotating selection of soft serve flavors that changes often enough to give regulars a reason to check back, and a careful approach to mix-ins, toppings, and coatings that keeps things from feeling gimmicky.
On any given visit you might find classic vanilla with a hard chocolate shell, or something more seasonal — a berry swirl, a brown butter variation, a flavor that sounds experimental but lands. The prices are genuinely reasonable for downtown Salem, usually in the five-to-eight dollar range depending on what you’re building. They also do shakes and floats, though most people you’ll see at the counter are there for the curl itself.
What sets Ritter’s apart from a standard soft serve window is the attention to texture and temperature. The curl holds its shape. The shell cracks cleanly. These sound like small things until you’ve had soft serve that collapses before you get to the door, or a coating that never quite sets. Whoever is running the machine here knows what they’re doing, and that consistency matters more than a long menu.
The best time to go is mid-afternoon on a weekday, before the after-school crowd arrives. Summer evenings can get a line out the door, which is a reasonable trade-off for the weather, but if you want to actually linger and look at the flavor board without feeling rushed, the quieter window is better. They’re also open later than you’d expect for a soft serve spot, which makes them a legitimate after-dinner option in a part of downtown that closes up early.
Commercial Street has changed a lot in the last several years — more foot traffic, more new businesses, a few closures that left gaps. Ritter’s fits the block without trying too hard to be a destination. It’s the kind of place Salem residents mention when someone visiting asks where to get something good and simple, not because it’s the most impressive thing in town, but because it reliably delivers on exactly what it promises.
If you’ve been sleeping on soft serve, this is a decent place to reconsider. Go on a warm afternoon, get the curl with the shell, and eat it outside before it makes its case too quickly.
