The Exuberant Joy of an Indian Ice Cream Shop at 11 p.m.
The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.
The line outside the Indian ice cream shop is, in a word, outrageous.
Sandwiched between a dental office and an injection clinic in an anonymous Sunnyvale plaza, Pints of Joy doesn’t, at first glance, look like it’d be the site of an exuberant after-hours party. And yet: There are at least 15 or 20 customers ahead of us in line when we pull up to the scoop shop at a quarter past 10 on a recent Friday night — and easily another 30 ice cream eaters seated inside, or at the handful of tables on the string light–bedecked courtyard, or just sprawled out on the decorative planter boxes in front.
Almost everyone appears to be South Asian. And because a good chunk of the crowd has come in big, boisterous groups of five or six, the place pulses with the electricity of happy late-night conversation. At one outdoor table, a multigenerational family — Boomer grandparents, Gen X kids, Gen Z grandkids — teases each other over waffle cones. Inside, a table of eight bespectacled men in their 20s gesticulate vigorously with their hands, in the thick of some lively discussion. (Speaking as two glasses-wearing Asians, we never felt more at home among our people than at this Sunnyvale ice cream shop.)
The reason for Pints of Joy’s popularity isn’t just the convenience of being an ice cream parlor that stays open until 11 p.m. on weekends. What sets the shop apart is its lineup of Indian-inspired flavors — a breathtaking array even among the Bay Area’s small handful of other new-school South Asian ice cream brands. There are flavors named after traditional, spice-laden Indian desserts like ras malai, falooda and malai kulfi. There are tropical fruits I love (mango! jackfruit!) and others I’d never heard of, like chikoo — a grainy, vaguely pear-like fruit that folks in India sometimes add to milkshakes or turn into dehydrated chips. One flavor, the meetha paan, even features fresh betel leaves.
All told, there were nearly 30 flavors to choose from, all intriguing. For probably a third of them, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what the ice cream might taste like. On a busy night like this one, when it wasn’t possible for us to take our time sampling three or four different flavors before making up our minds, the shop’s four-scoop flight ($14.99), served on a handsome wooden tray, is a nice option — especially if you’re sharing with a couple of friends.
We wound up picking more or less at random, but all of the flavors we chose were a hit. The gulab jamun flavor is a fun, inspired twist on the syrup-soaked “Indian donuts,” with chunks of the sweet dough balls mixed into the ice cream itself.
Meanwhile, our scooper’s top recommendation is the Biscoff cookie flavor, which features crumbled bits of the crisp, caramelly cookies (a popular treat in India, it turns out). This winds up being our favorite; it’s extravagantly delicious, like a bolder, more texturally interesting cookies and cream.
In addition to the audaciousness of the flavors, the other distinguishing feature of the ice cream at Pints of Joy is that it doesn’t have any eggs in it, so the scoops aren’t as dense or creamy as the ones at some of my favorite high-end creameries, like Bi-Rite or Lush Gelato. The texture is lighter here; the ice cream melts a little bit faster.
The bonus is that the eggless approach makes for flavors that are more vivid and refreshing, perfect for the shop’s dazzling palette of tropical fruits. So, for the third scoop in our flight, I loved the intense, honeyed sweetness of the Alphonso mango ice cream, made with the pulp from real Indian mangoes, aka the “king of fruits.” And the most provocative flavor of the night was the custard apple, aka sitaphal, which includes strands of the fruit’s creamy, delicate flesh. The flavor lies somewhere between a banana and a less pungent durian.
For Indian sweets lovers who want their frozen confections to taste even more Indian, Pints of Joy also offers a selection of ice cream desserts modeled closely after traditional Indian sweets. The maximalist gajar halwa sundae comes dusted with almonds and crushed pistachios and has a layer of sticky-sweet carrot gelatin (the “gajar halwa”) on the bottom of the bowl. The mango mastani, meanwhile, is like if you took a mango lassi and added a scoop of mango ice cream, and also scattered a handful of Tutti-Frutti candy and nuts on top.
Suffice it to say, we’re on a bit of a sugar high by the end of the night.
All around us, though, the party rages on. Even as late as 10:45 p.m., we see children, maybe 8 or 9 years old, out past their bedtime, getting in line with their parents. The very last customer is a young South Asian woman in pajamas who sneaks in the door right as the store is closing up shop and walks out a few minutes later holding two pints in a plastic bag. She’s on the phone, probably letting friends or family know that her late-night mission was a success.
By this point, it’s well past 11 o’clock, and Pints of Joy has technically closed. But even halfway across the parking lot, we still hear the echoes of everyone’s happy chatter.
Pints of Joy is open Tuesday to Thursday 11 a.m.–9 p.m., Friday to Saturday 11 a.m.–11 p.m. and Sunday noon to 10 p.m. at 717 E. El Camino Real in Sunnyvale. The shop also has locations in Fremont and Palo Alto (at Rick’s Ice Cream).
