Ruby Scoops owner Rabia Kamara says the Richmond ice cream shop can no longer afford to operate in its current Brookland Park space. The business has been at 310 W. Brookland Park Blvd. since October 2024, after expanding from a smaller storefront, and Kamara says the larger space’s overhead has become unsustainable.
Kamara described the situation on social media, writing, “we cannot continue operating in our current space. Staying here is no longer sustainable,” according to Richmond Times-Dispatch. RVAHub reproduced the post, in which she thanked the community for supporting the shop over its six years in business.
Ruby Scoops opened in Brookland Park in 2020 in a smaller space. The move to its current storefront followed two and a half years of construction. The shop is in a mixed-use building with apartments upstairs and Scrap RVA downstairs. Kamara has said she wanted to remain in Brookland Park, where she had built the business.
From Reality TV Win to a Much Bigger Storefront
The expansion followed Kamara’s appearance on the Food Network competition show “Ben & Jerry's: Clash of the Cones” in 2021. Axios reported that Kamara won the $20,000 first prize. Kamara said that after the show aired, “things got immediately crazy” and she needed more room to meet demand.
Axios reported in 2022 that the planned move would increase seating from eight to at least 50. The Richmond Times-Dispatch later reported that the 3,500-square-foot buildout expanded seating from 12 to 85. Kamara now says the overhead associated with the larger footprint has outpaced what the business can sustain.
Astronomical Bills and a Toll on Her Health
Kamara has described the shop as very large and its overhead as astronomical. She said the past year was the business’s worst yet and that conditions continued to worsen.
Kamara has also said the effort to keep Ruby Scoops open has affected her physical and emotional health, including through stress, anxiety and sleepless nights. She has described the prospect of losing the business she built over more than a decade as deeply painful, and called the shop both her dream and a creative outlet for telling stories through food.
Searching for a New Home
Kamara says leaving the current space does not have to mean closing Ruby Scoops. She is asking the community to help identify a new location, according to the RVAHub post.
Brookland Park and the wider food-business market
Separate projects are also moving forward along Brookland Park Boulevard. Richmond BizSense reported work on a youth boxing hub, Nostalgia Tattoo’s move to a larger space at 214 W. Brookland Park Blvd., and plans by the owners of Unlimited Performance to turn part of their storefront into a coffee shop and art gallery. That corridor reporting describes separate projects, not Ruby Scoops’ lease or finances, or a citywide assessment of storefront conditions.
For broader regional context, The Virginian-Pilot, citing Virginia Department of Health data, reported that Richmond food permit requests had declined compared with pre-pandemic numbers, while requests in Henrico and Chesterfield counties had trended up compared with 2019. Those figures describe permit trends; they do not identify an independent business that relocated or closed because of expansion or occupancy costs, or establish Ruby Scoops’ circumstances.
Ruby Scoops' predicament arrives the same year the Richmond Times-Dispatch tallied 58 new Richmond-area restaurants that opened, a reminder of how competitive the local food and drink scene has become even as an established, award-winning shop fights to stay open.
