Dining Out: Ottawa ice cream makers serve special flavours worth the brain freeze
A few short years ago, these outré and extravagant ice cream scoops were nowhere to be found in Ottawa.
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Chris’s Ice Cream
5510 Canotek Rd., Unit 4, chrissicecream.com
Open: Thursday to Sunday noon to 6 p.m., closed Monday to Wednesday
Happy Rolls Dessert Bar
1195 Wellington St. W., happyrolls.ca
Open: Monday to Thursday 3 to 10 p.m., Friday 3 p.m. to midnight, Saturday 2 p.m. to midnight, Sunday 2 to 8 p.m.
Ice Flame
1398 Highgate Rd., theiceflame.com
Open: Daily from 3 p.m. to midnight
Love and Electric Ice Cream
1004 Wellington St. W., instagram.com/loveandelectric
Open: Daily from noon to 10 p.m.
Sadie Beans Ice Cream
Inside Ten Toes Coffee House, 837 Somerset St. W., instagram.com/sadiebeansicecream
Available: Twice weekly, check the Instagram page
Saffron Rolled Ice Cream and Desserts
2121 Carling Ave., Unit 3 (inside Carlingwood Mall), saffronrolledicecream.com
Open: Monday to Friday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where to go for special Ottawa ice cream flavours
I barrelled down the Queensway on a recent Thursday afternoon, gripped by a fresh sense of purpose and fear of missing out. Nothing focuses the mind like ice cream.
Heading west, I drove to the Chinatown location of Ten Toes Coffee House, hoping that some Sadie Beans Ice Cream would still be available. I had just learned that on Thursday mornings, the Ten Toes freezer is stocked with about 80 pints of esoterically flavoured indulgences — or rather, 20 pints each of four kooky creations. But in-the-know connoisseurs usually snap up everything by late afternoon.
I arrived a few minutes before 4 p.m. All that were left were three pints of Send Lawyers, Guns & Ice Cream, a honey parmesan ice cream with pink grapefruit curd and walnut praline. Eleven dollars plus tax and two scoops later, I experienced an ice cream game-changer that was sweet, salty, cheesy, umami-ish, nutty, sour, and more. Somehow, it worked, and wonderfully so.
That wacko flavour was just one cool treat I sampled during a week of seeking new ice cream thrills. While my discoveries haven’t replaced Moo Shu Ice Cream, The Merry Dairy, and The Beachconers Microcreamery as my favourite ice cream purveyors, they have certainly enlarged my options.
Who came up with parmesan ice cream? That would be the small-batch wizard named Tim Alleway. The Chinatown Ten Toes’ kitchen manager until very recently and before that a veteran of the Wellington Gastropub’s kitchen brigade, Alleway began selling ice cream in late 2022 under his brand, which is named after his daughter.
For the last year, Sadie Beans pints have sold out every Thursday. “It’s cool. There’s people that know, people who gather outside the door at 8 a.m. It’s very flattering,” he says.
Alleway doesn’t repeat flavours, which means he’s made about 200 oddball but compelling ice creams in the last year alone. “I haven’t run out of ideas yet,” he says.
Recent flavours have included yuzu vanilla bean ice cream with peanut chili crisp caramel and beer nuts, black forest doughnut ice cream with mocha cherry fudge and chocolate bits, and butter tart ice cream with brown sugar cream cheese streusel and dulce de leche.
Good news for Alleway’s fans: He just begun doubling his output, and there will be two ice cream-filled days each week at Ten Toes. To stay on top of what’s available, follow the Sadie Beans Instagram page.
I learned of Sadie Beans from fellow small-batch ice cream maker Chris Levesque of Chris’s Ice Cream on Canotek Road. Formerly the kitchen manager at Fat Boys Southern Smokehouse, Levesque started making ice cream there in 2019. Last July, he set up shop in an east-end industrial park building.
Levesque sells $7 half-pints of dense, rich ice cream that are “super-premium.” That means very little air is incorporated while churning. His ice cream is also “American-style,” which means they are made of just milk, cream and sugar, without the usual custard base.
He opts for flavours that strike notes from his childhood, like ice creams made with Jos Louis or Ah Caramel cakes. Recently he made Moon Mist, a tri-colour ice cream popular in Atlantic Canada that smashes together blue bubble gum, purple grape, and yellow banana flavours. A more adult concoction for Mother’s Day was Mommy’s Time Out, a sangria sorbet made with pinot grigio mangoes, strawberries, and pineapple.
Levesque’s stock was low when I visited, as he had been away on vacation. But I did verify that his super-rich, vegan chocolate sorbet was delicious. “I had one customer who asked me if I put crack in it,” Levesque says.
In Hintonburg, I popped into the recently opened Love and Electric Ice Cream shop, an offshoot of the Beachconers Microcreamery. Among the higher-end, from-scratch flavours there was a very refreshing and adult “real” mint chocolate, which was vibrantly green and herbaceous, with a scattering of dark chocolate morsels.
I also stopped by three of Ottawa newer rolled ice-cream shops. At all of them, staff prepare ice cream to order by mixing a cream-based liquid base and crushed toppings on a super-cold metal slab. The ingredients are brusquely mixed, flattened into a thin panel and then rolled into tubes of ice cream that stand up vertically in their cups.
While this kind of ice cream originated in Thailand about 15 years ago, these Ottawa rolled dessert shops put different cultural spins on their desserts.
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At the month-old Happy Rolls Dessert Bar in Hintonburg, its three owner-operators are South Asian. In addition to a mix of decidedly Western flavours (think Skor, Ferraro Rocher, strawberry cheesecake and cookie dough brownie), they serve a version of kulfi, an Indian ice cream in which mixed nuts aplenty star. My kulfi was fantastic — superbly nutty, creamy, fresh, and not too sweet.
Ice Flame on Highgate Road, which opened last fall, is one of seven franchise locations in Canada and part of the boom of South Asian eateries in Ottawa’s west end. Here, in addition to Western favourites like Swiss chocolate and Oreo rolled ice cream, you can choose Indian flavours like gulab jamun, made with spongy milk-solid balls, and rasmalai, made with paneer balls. I can vouch for cashew and fig-rolled ice cream.
Finally, there’s Saffron Rolled Ice Cream and Desserts, which opened in late 2023 in Carlingwood Mall. It serves Western and Persian flavours. Revelations here included the saffron special (saffron, pistachio, rosewater and rose petal), shir yakh (vanilla, cardamom and pistachio), and spicy mango (vanilla, mango and cayenne pepper). I tried and enjoyed saffron ice cream in fresh carrot juice, which I learned is about as Iranian as a root beer float is North American.
And to think, a few short years ago, these outré and extravagant ice cream flavours were nowhere to be found in Ottawa. Who says we’re the city that fun forgot? And why would we ever go back to plain old vanilla?
What’s your favourite ice cream shop or specialty flavour in Ottawa? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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