Tucked in between the row of restaurants and specialty stores on Ninth Street lies Ox & Rabbit Soda and Sundries, a soda fountain shop that has been open since May 2008.
The space, once known as McDonald's Drug Store, used to be a pharmacy-milkshake mecca that served the Durham community for 80 years. Bryan and Erin Nickellstage, the current owners of Ox & Rabbit, came across the abandoned space while on Ninth Street some and thought it would be interesting to take on a new project. Some three years later, Ox & Rabbit has proven itself to be a worthy fixture on Ninth.
“We wanted to have products that appealed to a different market than the street already had,” Brian said. “It turns out that the soda fountain brings a lot of people in.”
A Durham Native, Bryan would regularly stop by McDonald’s drug store for milkshakes after school.
“I remembered it so fondly as a child, and its fun to see kids walk up from E.K. Powe,” Brian said. “They look like my friends and me 20 years ago, that’s been a lot of fun.”
Ox & Rabbit serves a varied array of milkshakes (using milk shake base as opposed to ice cream, which makes for a thicker shake), hand-mixed sodas and egg creams. Egg creams (which incidentally contain no eggs) are beverages consisting of milk, soda water and some sort of flavor shot. Despite their out of the ordinary ingredients, egg creams are a must-try when visiting Ox & Rabbit. Do it. Flavors run from the traditional vanilla, chocolate, and cherry, dark chocolate, Mexican vanilla, lavender vanilla, white truffle, and ginger.
In addition to serving great shakes and other beverages, Ox & Rabbit also stocks plenty of specialty items such as Christmas ornaments, notebooks, candles, wrapping paper and much more. It could be a lot of fun to by a shake (or egg cream!) and explore their shelves of obscure products.
If you’re ever looking for an alternative to the Loops shakes, try Ox & Rabbit for a change. It tastes great and has very reasonable prices (think Coffeehouse). It’s also local, which is supposed to be in now, or something.
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