NASHUA – The most unconventional ice cream shop in the Gate City is finding a new home early this spring.

Sub Zero, the only place in New England where you can watch your ice cream essentially reverse time, will be moving from its Amherst Street location to 83 Main Street, in downtown Nashua. The move is expected to happen in March.

The unique dairy shop that flash-freezes a custom puddle of ice cream with liquid nitrogen is downsizing after six-and-a-half years of business.

“The pandemic has affected us, because we’re downsizing our space,” said Rita McCabe, co-owner of Sub Zero with her husband, Mark McCabe. “It’s actually a good thing though; the space has really been too big for us all along anyway, so we saw this as an opportunity to get onto Main Street, where there is a lot more walking traffic than there is on Amherst Street, of course.”

McCabe promised that the only difference between the locations would be the space. As there are currently dine-in seating options, those options will remain, “We’ll have seating there, too, there just won’t be as much seating,” she said.

Another standout facet of Sub Zero, aside from it being the most delicious science experiment on the planet, is the variety of options that come that easily accompany the process.

“There’s no ice cream made when you walk in the store, it’s all made to order – completely customized individually.” McCabe explained. “You walk in and you decide your base cream. Are you vegan? Do you need low-fat? Do you want yogurt? Do you want custard? Do you need a lactose-free option? Are you doing keto? We can accommodate all of those.”

After you’ve decided whether to indulge or stick to your New Year’s resolutions, you can then add in toppings of fruit, nuts or candy and then, BOOM! Your dessert is flash-frozen right before your eyes.

“It’s a whole experience, because it makes a lot of fog while you’re watching it, and you can wave your hands in the fog, so it hits all the senses,” McCabe said. “Liquid nitrogen is -321 degrees Fahrenheit, so it has just enough time to freeze the cream, and then as it’s evaporating, it sucks the heat out of the cream and turns it into ice cream right before your eyes.”

As it turns out, this process also makes your frozen treat more smooth, dense and creamy than any other ice cream, frozen yogurt, or non-dairy hybrid on the market, due to the lack of air in its formation.

“So, when you’re thinking about frozen yogurt places, those machines and anything with soft serve, that’s what the machine does. It injects air into the product to fluff it up; that’s why it melts so fast. The more air in an ice cream product, the faster it will melt. That’s the science behind it,” McCabe explained, adding, “The crystals don’t have time to grow. They’re instantly frozen so the crystals stay very, very small, which makes it very smooth and creamy on your tongue, and very dense and heavy in your hand.”

Again, it gets better. Freezing your ice cream with liquid nitrogen also gives you the ability to over-freeze it. So yes, this means you can get it delivered.

“We’re on the delivery services Doordash, Ubereats and Grubhub, so this can literally get delivered anywhere by the delivery services. We can over-freeze it so it’s going to stay super cold until it gets to where it’s going. It melts slower anyway, and then we blast the liquid nitrogen to boot. We’ve been doing delivery services for over a year-and-a-half, and we’ve had no complaints at all,” McCabe said.

As kids already absolutely lose their minds over frost-bitten ice cream that’s been sitting in the back of the freezer for six months, they love Sub Zero so much that the business has taken to uniquely conducting their already-unique business outside the store.

“What Sub Zero does is all about the science, because liquid nitrogen (goes along with) the states of matter when it changes it from a liquid to a solid. We have a lot of school science presentations and presentations for birthday parties and camps and all sorts of scouts and things like that,” McCabe said. “We teach the kids all the science, we do some fun, cool interactive experiments, so they get to learn why the ice cream is different, why it’s smoother and creamier; because it freezes so fast that the crystals don’t have time to grow.”

Until the new Main Street location is open for business, Sub Zero will remain open for dine-in, takeout and delivery at their 495 Amherst St. location.