The Ice Cream King Is Back: Original Painter’s Homemade Ice Cream Reopens in North Myrtle Beach

Some places on the Grand Strand you visit once and remember forever. Original Painter’s Homemade Ice Cream is one of them. It sits on Highway 17 South in North Myrtle Beach the way it always has — red roof catching the summer light, walk-up windows open to the salt air, picnic tables full of families working through cones before the ice cream wins the race with the heat. It opened in 1952 and has been part of the fabric of this stretch of coast ever since, surviving seven decades of beach town change through the simple and inexhaustible power of making something good from scratch and serving it with genuine care.

After a difficult stretch that saw the business change hands, struggle under new ownership, and temporarily close, Original Painter’s is coming back — and it is coming back the right way. The Munafo family has reacquired the shop, and Dominic Anthony Munafo, the man North Myrtle Beach has known for years as the Ice Cream King, is returning to the counter he has spent most of his adult life behind. The kitchen is being gutted and rebuilt with modern equipment. The made-from-scratch ice cream is coming back. And the man who once delivered butter pecan backstage to B.B. King is ready to make sure nobody leaves unhappy.

For anyone staying in Ocean Drive or along Crescent Beach this summer, this is the news you have been waiting for.

A North Myrtle Beach Institution Comes Home

The story of Original Painter’s over the past few years is one that the North Myrtle Beach community has watched with both affection and anxiety. Dominic Munafo had worked in his father James Mantzanas’s shop for more than 24 years — making ice cream, building relationships with customers who came back season after season, delivering cones to performers backstage at the House of Blues — before taking formal ownership himself. When the family sold the business in late 2023, it marked a genuine transition for a shop that had been part of the Munafo family’s identity for the better part of three decades.

The transition did not go smoothly. The new ownership struggled to maintain the shop’s standards, according to accounts shared by longtime customers and regulars on social media, and Original Painter’s eventually closed earlier in 2026. For a stretch of time, Google Maps listed it as permanently closed — a designation that felt wrong to anyone who had spent a North Myrtle Beach summer eating their way through a lineup of flavors made on-site since before the interstate existed.

Then the Munafo family moved to get it back. By June 2026, the reacquisition was complete, and Dominic was already at work on the kitchen renovation that will define this next chapter of the shop. He told reporters he missed the work and missed the people — a sentiment that, for anyone who has watched him work a summer crowd on Highway 17, rings entirely true.

Seventy-Four Years on Highway 17

Original Painter’s Homemade Ice Cream was founded in 1952 by Mr. and Mrs. Painter, a couple who believed that North Myrtle Beach needed a place where ice cream was taken seriously — made from real ingredients, on-site, by people who understood that the difference between mass-produced and handmade is not a marketing distinction but a sensory one. The Painters started with a vision of being the place to go for ice cream on the Grand Strand, and for more than seven decades, that is exactly what they built.

The exterior of the shop has barely changed since those early years. The red roof is still there. The walk-up service windows are still there. The outdoor picnic tables where families have been eating ice cream in the North Myrtle Beach heat since the Eisenhower administration are still there. That deliberate preservation of the 1950s aesthetic is part of what makes Original Painter’s feel like something beyond a business — it is a piece of institutional memory for the Grand Strand, the kind of place that people drive past and feel something before they even stop, because they have been stopping here their whole lives.

Inside, the kitchen is where the real identity of the shop has always lived. Dominic Munafo has described making ice cream as a matter of feel and instinct as much as recipe — the way the mixture is whipped, the temperature at which it is stored, the particular attention paid to texture and taste that comes from decades of doing the same thing with the same care. At the height of the summer season, Munafo has made as many as 85 tubs of ice cream in a single session, keeping upwards of 180 buckets in the freezer ahead of the spring break and summer crowds. That level of production, done by hand and from scratch, is what Original Painter’s has always meant when it says homemade.

The Making of the Ice Cream King

Dominic Anthony Munafo did not give himself the title of Ice Cream King. It was given to him by someone who knew something about royalty. The late B.B. King — the King of the Blues himself — was a regular customer and a devotee of Original Painter’s butter pecan, a flavor he loved despite the dietary complications that came with being diabetic. Munafo had developed the habit of making special backstage deliveries to performers at the House of Blues in Myrtle Beach, and on one of those visits, when he brought the butter pecan to B.B. King’s dressing room, the blues legend looked at the man who had made the ice cream and gave him the name that has defined his reputation on the Grand Strand ever since.

Munafo has always worn the title with a specific sense of purpose. He has said that the Ice Cream King’s sole purpose is to make sure nobody leaves the shop unhappy — a standard that sounds simple and is, in practice, the hardest standard there is. It requires not just good ice cream but the kind of attentiveness to customers that makes a transaction feel like a relationship. For the families who have been coming to Original Painter’s for generations, that is precisely what Munafo represents: continuity, quality, and the particular pleasure of being remembered.

Munafo, originally from Baltimore, Maryland, brought to the shop the work ethic of a man raised in the family business tradition. His father James Mantzanas modeled a business philosophy centered on quality, client care, and the kind of pride in craft that does not bend to shortcuts. After more than two decades learning that philosophy from the inside, Munafo internalized it completely. Now, at the age of 74 and with the keys back in his hands, he is applying it again from scratch — literally.

Vanna White, B.B. King, and a Wall Full of Stories

Walk into Original Painter’s and one of the first things you notice is the walls. They are covered in photographs, signed memorabilia, and the accumulated visual record of a business that has spent seventy-four years at the intersection of North Myrtle Beach community life and a touring circuit that has brought some of the most recognizable names in American entertainment through this stretch of the South Carolina coast.

Among the most prominent is a signed photograph from Vanna White, the Wheel of Fortune host and proud Conway, South Carolina native who has been coming to Painter’s long enough to have a menu item named after her. On a 2020 episode of Wheel of Fortune, White told host Pat Sajak that in her hometown of North Myrtle Beach, there was a Vanna Banana Split at Painter’s Ice Cream — and that she had been going there for, she paused, a very long time. White’s connection to the shop is not ceremonial. It is the kind of relationship that develops between a local institution and the people who grew up considering it a fixed point of summer.

Beyond Vanna White and B.B. King, the list of performers who have eaten Munafo’s ice cream during House of Blues runs reads like a broad and eclectic survey of American music: Eric Clapton, Hootie and the Blowfish, Outkast, Disturbed, Puddle of Mudd, Weezer, Mac Miller, and Marilyn Manson, among many others. Munafo has said that one of his favorite things about the work is never knowing who might come through the door or be waiting backstage — a sentiment that speaks to the particular pleasure of running a business that genuinely serves everyone, from the family on their first North Myrtle Beach vacation to the rock star looking for something real before the show.

What’s Changing — and What Isn’t

The exterior of Original Painter’s is staying exactly as it is. The red roof, the walk-up windows, the outdoor seating, the 1950s-era silhouette that signals to returning visitors — from the road, from memory, from years of habit — that they have arrived at the right place. That is not changing. What is changing is everything inside the production side of the shop.

Munafo is overseeing a complete renovation of the kitchen, replacing old equipment with modern machinery capable of supporting the from-scratch production that is Original Painter’s signature. The goal is simple and unambiguous: everything will be made the way it always was, by hand and on-site, with no shortcuts taken on ingredients or process. The flavors that regulars have been ordering for decades — butter pecan, maple nut, pistachio almond, banana pudding, strawberry cheesecake, the classics — will return. New additions are planned as well, though Munafo has not yet detailed the full updated menu. What he has made clear is that the commitment to quality that defined the shop’s first seven decades will define its next chapter.

The shop made ice cream in a volume that would surprise most people unfamiliar with what demand looks like on the Grand Strand in peak summer — dozens of tubs per session, more than a hundred buckets staged and ready as spring break arrived and the seasonal crowds began their annual pilgrimage to Highway 17. Getting that production infrastructure back online with new equipment, and doing it right rather than fast, is the work Munafo is focused on as the shop prepares to reopen. He has been doing this long enough to know that the ice cream has to be right before the doors open, not after.

Where to Find It This Summer

Original Painter’s Homemade Ice Cream is located at 2408 Highway 17 South, North Myrtle Beach, SC 29582. The red roof and classic facade make it unmistakable from the road. It is worth noting that a separate, entirely independent business called Painter’s Homemade Ice Cream operates in Murrells Inlet — the two shops have no affiliation, and Original Painter’s on Highway 17 South is the one with the 74-year history, the celebrity wall, and the Ice Cream King behind the counter.

For visitors staying in Cherry Grove Beach or along the Windy Hill section of the beach, Original Painter’s is a short drive south on Highway 17. It has always functioned best as the kind of stop you make on the way back from somewhere — from dinner, from a day on the water, from whatever the Grand Strand offered that afternoon. An evening cone from Painter’s is one of those small rituals that beach vacations are quietly built around, the kind of thing that ends up in the family photograph and gets talked about on the drive home.

For those renting oceanfront homes or oceanfront condos in Ocean Drive or Crescent Beach, a trip to Painter’s is exactly the kind of spontaneous, unscheduled evening that North Myrtle Beach does better than anywhere. You park on Highway 17, walk up to the window, order something you probably haven’t had in a year and have been thinking about since the last time you left, and stand there in the summer night eating it at a picnic table while the kids argue about whose flavor is better. That is Original Painter’s. It has been that for 74 years. And now, with the Ice Cream King back behind the counter, it is going to keep being that for a long time to come.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources: MyHorryNews.com; WMBF News; Yahoo News / AOL News (reporting by Chase Karacostas); MyrtleBeach.com; Tripadvisor; Yelp. Reopening date and operational details as reported June 9, 2026. Confirm current hours directly with Original Painter’s Homemade Ice Cream at (843) 272-6934 before visiting.

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