You just look like ice cream.

It’s certainly one of the oddest-sounding sentiments I’ve ever relayed to an interview subject, let alone one who has quickly become the face of Columbus’ entrepreneurial spirit.

But, before our interview, it was the quickest word association I could come up with for Jeni Britton Bauer; when I see the lines cascading from the door of her High Street ice cream parlor, the flavor of her artisan wares and the cultivated image of the fair-skinned, blond-haired milkmaid blend together like chocolate and Cayenne.

When we showed up at her test kitchen to take a few photos, imagine our surprise at seeing her dressed all in black, glasses perched over her pulled-back hair, describing Columbus as a “punk-rock city with no rules,” while detailing her love for fast cars and loud classic rock.

With a new Nashville location and a best-selling book in stores nationwide, there’s plenty of new business to discuss with Jeni – but by the time we were done, I was even more eager to find out what was on her iPod.

What are the ingredients for success, so to speak, with Jeni’s? Or, more specifically, how you have played into the success of the company that bears your name?

Hmm … I’m a very focused person. When I get an idea that I want to pursue in my head, it trumps everything else in my life – I go for it. I have this great team now, and if it’s a bad idea, it’ll come out that it’s a bad idea, but a lot of times, it’s not. Often times, it’s a good idea and it’ll be last minute … do you ever have something [with the magazine] when it changes like two weeks out?

Absolutely.

That happens a lot here. I have hustle and I have “go,” but I can only do that when I’m doing what I need to be doing. In order to have a life like that, you need to be able to shed you fear of failure. And I always say I’m a nice person, but I’m an unmanageable personality. If I need to get something done, I do it. Whenever someone tells me I can’t, it’s more reason to do it. I mean, I don’t care if I have to like move all the furniture upstairs by myself, I’ll do it by myself. It’s like I have superman powers when I start doing it when I get that idea in my head of what I want to do.

So you have sort of a stubborn streak? Or is it impatience?

Well, I will say creativity is sort of mysterious. What is creativity? My world is curious and impatient. It’s just constantly seeking out something else – a mode of inspiration – and when it hits and when I want something, it’s like an absolute impatience for solving.

Is that why the wall behind you is filled with hand-drawn notes and phrases? Like A Beautiful Mind?

Yeah (laughs). Sometimes you just put something up there because you don’t want to forget. I didn’t draw this (she points to a chalk ice cream image) – this was something done for a photo shoot by our designer; the only thing that I drew was this bright green and yellow line going through everything. And then I smeared everything because it was too perfect for me. I like things messy. I like all of my inspirations out. When I was a kid, I had messy rooms, very messy rooms, and my mother would get very pissed at me about it. Then, I would clean it and suddenly I would be uninspired and bored.

You and your husband Charly are essentially co-founders, which has to increase the potential to take work home with you …

We bring work home all the time (laughs). You know, luckily, Charly and I have a great relationship, partly because our strengths work together really well. Charlie’s also creative, but he’s creative in a more mathematical way.

Tell me more about Charly. I mean, behind every great businessperson is a supportive spouse, and in this case, he’s also your right-hand man.

Charly and I really work together as partners. I don’t come up with any collections without spending several wine-filled evenings around our dining room table with Charly. The best way to describe Charly is a beer in one hand and a New Yorker in the other (laughs). He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, in an academic way. He knows a lot about a lot. He’s a neat guy. (Jeni smiles and points to a black-and-white picture of Charly, changing a tire, tucked in the corner of her office window). That’s my picture from when I first met him. He’s quite a character. We’re kind of both into cars.

Even though you are the name and face of the company, you insist that you are painfully shy. I don’t see it, really. Was it more evident when you were a kid?

Well, my natural personality is to stay in the background. It’s to work my ass off, and just work. I love working and I never stop; even when I’m sleeping, I think. [Being the face of the company] was OK with me. It was going to be ice cream or it was going to be sock monkeys or whatever … it was always going to be something that kept me awake at night. But yeah, I did, I grew up really, really shy. I moved almost every year. I wasn’t shy at home or with my small group of friends in my neighborhood, but as soon as I went to school, I was just incredibly shy. And I hated school ever since I first started.

I was going to say, school seems like it wouldn’t have been your favorite place considering your personality.

So we’ve already established that I kind of like to do my own thing … you can’t do whatever you want in school. I mean, I would get cold sweats walking into a school right now, just driving by, they always look like prisons to me. I had great art teachers and history teachers that changed my life, but in general I just wasn’t cut out for school; I hated it. And then when I got to Ohio State, I loved it. My personality was not, ‘OK, get the prerequisites out of the way and then find a career path.’ No, I just took classes that I wanted to. I convinced professors to let me into higher-level classes, so I would take something like graduate level classes on the French Revolution, and I would learn about French ancient torture techniques (laughs).

Was that sort of a turning point?

It’s such a big school, I could be anonymous if I wanted to be, but I tended to come out of my shell a little bit more at Ohio State because I felt safe after the first year. And Ohio State is a lot like the library, you walk onto campus and you’re standing there in the middle of the Oval and you just know that you are in the center of all knowledge: it’s all right there. If I could have built a degree, I would have done it in art and dairy science (laughs).

You’ve said you and your husband are both into cars. What’s the attraction?

I just like zippy cars. I like acceleration and I like turns. I like accelerating quickly, and a car that hugs the road during turns. Not loose. I drive fast, but I’m a very respectful driver, I don’t show off. But I do have a favorite; when you’re leaving Easton and you can get over three lanes and there’s the curve right away when you’re getting on 670. I like the challenge. There’s something about being one with your car, and your car being an extension of you and listening to music and thinking. It all comes together for some reason, and that’s why I love driving.

What’s the soundtrack to said drives?

(laughs) Well, I love my iPod. It’s hilarious. I love pop music, for one thing. But right now I’ve got Motley Crue “Not Too Young to Fall in Love” and Judas Priest playing a lot. I’ll also switch to Bonnie Prince Billy, and then Agnes Opal, who’s a really, really depressing Danish singer, but really cool. The Cars “Living In Stereo,” I’ll have that on repeat, sometimes for two hours. I just I love that song. It’s just kind of cheesy, but I love it. I love the Black Keys, too. They’re all over my iPod right now. They’re right near our Nashville shop, so I actually gave them a tour one of the first days before we opened in October.

For some reason that doesn’t really go with the image of Jeni that everybody has, flying down I-670 banging Judas Priest …

I’m taking a driving class at Mid-Ohio every day. I’m so excited. Anyway (laughs) …

What else do people not know about Jeni?

I like to listen to loud music, and I like to drive around in my car. I totally am an Ohio country girl, even though I only lived in the country for like one year. I mean, I grew up between the country and the city, moving every year.

Where was this?

I lived in London, Ohio. I gotta tell you, some of those most cherished memories are the sort of trouble you get into as a kid in the country. In fifth and sixth grade, I lived in the country in Ohio, but before that I lived in the city in Peoria. There, ‘fun’ is walking around alleys and going up and down an old fashioned elevator in the apartment buildings downtown. But the country was really fun. I love my memories of being in some guy’s hot rod listening to Hank Williams or something really loud. It really wasn’t my personality, but I just loved it, and to this day, I just think that’s so awesome. I like the farm boys (laughs).

Do you have any time to listen to any local bands?

Lydia Loveless, do you know her?

Yes, I do.

She’s kick-ass. I like her a lot. I like the Randys, too. And the Floorwalkers is just about the best name ever for a band.

What was the light bulb moment for you as an ice cream maker?

In 1996, when I first started and mixed Cayenne and chocolate together and served it to friends at the table … when I had the first bite of that and it was cold, and then I tasted the chocolate and a few seconds later it got hot – it was like, Oh my god. The world stopped for a second, and I knew. I truly knew that this was what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life. And that it would all be OK. And I’ve never doubted it.

Take me through the early days of your ice cream making.

I remember being in the first month of working; I was so tired. My shoes didn’t fit the next day because my feet were so swollen from working on the concrete. It was a very hard several years. And even in that first month, I remember thinking, ‘I’m done.’ It was midnight, I wanted to go home because I’d have to be back here at seven in the morning and there would be dishes waiting for me. And I was like, ‘I’ll wash them when I get in tomorrow morning or I’ll have one of the girls do it.’ It was more convenient. And I turned around and my sign was there with my name on it. It was hilarious, it was a flapping piece of paper printed at Kinkos with these clips from the hardware store hanging up and the air conditioning was running and it was flowing in the wind, and I saw ‘Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams’ right on it. I was like, ‘You know, nobody else is going to do it if I don’t do it. This is my company. My name is on every single thing we do and it better be what I expect it to be, to the best that I can.’ So I stayed and did dishes, and that’s exactly what’s happened ever since. Taking that seriously is the best thing you can do. It’s not the most interesting thing in the world, but it’s the best thing you can do because, in the end, I’m the one who sets that tone.

Say it’s the middle of the night and you’re getting a late night snack – what do you reach for? What is your favorite Jeni’s flavor?

Salty Caramel or Lemon Yogurt. Lemon Yogurt, depending on the season, is my favorite flavor – I’ll never get sick of it. But if it’s winter, I’ll go for the Salty Caramel. We make that in a copper pot over open flame, batch by batch, so I always say it’s like music; when you use flavoring, it’s like 10 notes and those are good notes, but when you make caramel over an open flame like that by caramelizing sugar slowly, you get hundreds of flavor notes. It’s a really dangerous thing, but it’s a special way to make caramel like that, the way we do it.

Actually, maybe that was a bad question. Something that special may be too nice for a midnight snack …

I was actually thinking, ‘What would I eat in the middle of the night?’ Probably like leftover spaghetti or something (laughs). That’s like Nigella Lawson at the end of her show, she’ll go in her fridge in the middle of the night and get something to eat that she made the day before. I cook a lot, too.

So when are you going to open a restaurant?

Right? Wouldn’t that be awesome? I don’t know how people have restaurants; that, to me, sounds like such a hard thing to do.I have so much respect for restaurateurs in our city. I’ll tell you what my favorite dish right now on somebody’s menu is though: the ricotta and greens over at Third and Hollywood.

Can’t say I’ve had it.

They take Snowville whole milk and make ricotta when you order it. And they put it in this little cast iron dish and put truffle oil over it and they put it on another dish with super garlicky greens and then you just get toast … that’s my dinner a lot. I love cheese (laughs). It’s my favorite thing in the world. If somebody told me they couldn’t have booze or they couldn’t eat sugar, I would feel bad for them. But if someone told me they couldn’t have dairy, they couldn’t eat cheese? I would just give them a hug, like, ‘I’m so sorry, you can’t eat cheese.’ (laughs)

How much do you think of your role as a businesswoman as opposed to a businessperson? Does that ever factor in?

Most of the time I’ll let other people look at our business and decide, but I definitely think that there are differences in the way that men run businesses and women run businesses – or in the way create products and relate to the world. I think our business is a very feminine business, but my version of feminine is kind of balls out … it’s not cute. My team here, we all work together and we’re proud that we have a business that feels a little more like a woman created it … just more of a badass woman, I would say (laughs).

Your flavors are quite adventurous; there have to be a few that never saw the light of the day, or were just too crazy to pull it off.

The smoked banana is one that comes to mind. My friend Ben, who plays timpani in the symphony, smokes a bunch of things and we always go over and eat it. One year, he smoked bananas and we brought ice cream … so I wanted to make this smoked banana ice cream. I called up my friends at City Barbecue and I’m like, ‘This is what I’m gonna do.’ Ten minutes in, that smoker turned those bananas into turpentine (laughs). Complete failure. It will work; it’s just that we haven’t been able to do it yet.

What were some of the other things that you thought about doing when you were younger?

When I was very young, when all the parents said you could be whatever you want to be in your life – a doctor, a lawyer, or I don’t know, an astronaut – to me, that didn’t sound like a lot of fun. I mean my grandmother is an art teacher and an artist; that sounded like fun. Fashion sounded like fun. I remember saying when I was a kid, that I’d rather have a small ice cream shop in a great location like near a beach or in a great city and barely make it work, than work my ass off trying to get a bigger house and a bigger car trying to please my grandparents or whatever. So that’s kind of what I did.

At the end of the day, it might be easy for someone to say, ‘It’s just ice cream.’ But, there’s something more there with Jeni’s – a reason why the lines are out the door, sometimes even in the winter …

I think there’s an artistic element to what we do and we truly believe in it. I believe that every detail builds experience, and the more I learned over the years, the more I understood the sort of psychology of flavor – that every single detail actually makes the ice cream taste better. You taste ice creams in different ways. If you get crappy fluorescent lighting and bad music and dirty fixtures with your ice cream experience – that makes the ice cream taste less interesting. Truly, if you know that the vanilla beans came from Lulu Sturdy in Uganda and that we import the vanilla beans directly to our kitchen and we’re her only importers in the United States … the reason we go through all of these steps, the reason that we pay that much to get all of these things in here is because they are the best vanilla beans that we’ve ever had. And you can’t get them anywhere else in the United States – you have to get them here. And when we steep them right in the Snowville cream, from those grass-fed cows … it becomes more of an experience. It’s about your friend, your conversation, or it becomes more of an event than just inhaling ice cream.

This goes back to the Columbus landscape, too. It’s a cool time right now in Columbus, and you’re sort of leading this entrepreneurial artisinal food revolution. Is that something you think about?

Well, before I started Jeni’s, I had dinner with some friends and we all went around the room asking, ‘What are you still doing in Columbus?’ Because at that time, around 2000, everybody had gone to Portland or Seattle or New York. So we had this fun, ‘What Are You Doing in Columbus?’ party. Why are you still here? What are you gonna bring to this city? And everybody had left the city because they were pansies and they were complaining about it, but we were at a time when you could do whatever you want, and we were passionate about what we could bring to it. This is our city. You have to get up out of your seat and give back and participate. You have to build it.