LICK brings flavours of fun to Bengaluru

LICK or Lavonne Ice Cream Kitchen is the city’s latest spot to cool off this summer

It is three o’clock in the middle of the week and there is a line spilling out of LICK on to the pavement, and lining two of its walls. Not even a week into its opening and the staff are politely trying to manage the crowd that is trying to navigate their way into the store and out of the heat.

The Lavonne Ice Cream Kitchen has a lot going for it apart from its tantalisingly-innocent name LICK. Whether it is their sundaes, scoops, melts (ice cream in a delicious, sippable avatar) or mocktails, LICK offers a range of tried-and-tested flavours as well as surprising specials. Where else would one find a toasted coconut ice cream, tropical fruit sorbet and coconut tres leches sundae (Beach Party)? Or a scoop of Watermelon Feta which was sold out within minutes of LICK opening for the day? Or a rather ambiguous sounding carrot milk?

According to Prathana Narang, lead chef at LICK, the menu card did not write itself — a lot of trial and error, combinations and permutations, went into crafting their flavours.

“We spent months on ice cream trials to see whether flavour profiles should be savoury, sweet or a mix of both, and we came up with some interesting flavours such as our watermelon feta. The saltiness of feta paired beautifully with freshness of watermelon in an ice cream,” she says, adding, “From the hundreds of experiments we carried out, we narrowed them down to the first 16 that we launched with, chosen from the feedback of a lot of people, helping us perfect it.”

Prathana says the aim of the team was to introduce “fun, but relatable flavors” that would appeal to all age groups.

“Almost all of us love avocado on toast for breakfast, so why not as an ice cream? We tried variations such as avocado and olive oil, and avocado and a hint of yogurt for freshness, until we hit on a winning equation for our avocado ice cream which is drizzled with olive oil and served with a slice of toasted bread.”

The team also cracked the code for high protein, no added-sugar ice creams. “Every scoop of high protein ice cream contains 15 grams of protein per 100 grams. It was quite a challenge to formulate without compromising on the texture of a scoop, so this is something we are really excited about.”