Between Nashville’s iconic Music Row and Vanderbilt University, Sarabha’s Creamery, the city’s first homemade Indian-style ice cream shop, quietly works sweet, frozen magic from the second story of a nondescript strip mall. It’s the passion project of husband-and-wife duo Gursharan Singh and Manpreet Gill, who opened the parlor in 2022 after leaving jobs in tech. As Gill explained in an interview with Nashville Scene, the pair saw the empty storefront and decided to make the switch almost immediately. 

The mango kulfi—reminiscent of a tropical creamsicle—is the perfect starter to a multi-course ice cream feast, and comes in flavors like malai (with cardamom and milk solids) and kesar pista (saffron with pistachios). It melts quickly, so it’s both logistically sound and extremely satisfying to lick it off the stick as quickly as possible. 

The rest of the ice creams are equally stellar. Sarabhas’s incorporates less air into its Indian-style ice cream than a typical American scoop, giving it a texture more akin to gelato. Pair flavors such as rose tutti frutti, cardamom-scented Indian coffee, and paan nawabi (made with rose petals and cashews) in a crispy waffle cone or bowl, then wash it all down with a steaming masala chai.

Visually, the star of the show is Sarabhas’ vibrant falooda, which arrives brimming with malai ice cream, sweet basil seeds, vermicelli noodles, and jellied fruit bobbing a cup of ice-cold milk, all finished with a cherry and a swirl of fuchsia rose syrup. Originally invented in Persia more than 2,500 years ago, faloodeh is a dessert made from frozen vermicelli soaked in a rose syrup. Persians began arriving in India during the 8th century, so faloodeh had plenty of time to catch on, attain royal status, and then morph into a popular milkshake-like dessert, all while retaining almost exactly the same name—falooda.