The couple has an four-year-old daughter and eight-month-old son. A proficient home cook, the Peranakan Zhi An hosts dinner parties at home. “I learnt cooking from my mum. Most of the ladies in my family are good cooks, but I just fell into making ice cream. It gives me a lot of leeway to try things out. That’s why our shop’s tagline is ‘whimsical mixes’. We’ve done pepper ice cream before,” she shares. Her husband Greg adds, “She can cook a lot of good dishes, but ice cream is what we enjoy the most. We realised ice cream makes people the happiest, plus people told us our ice cream was so good we should open a shop. We started out as a purely online service, then we got involved in fairs and started renting commercial kitchens to make ice cream. It grew to a point where we needed our own kitchen because it was too costly to rent a commercial kitchen.”

Greg currently still holds a day job as a safety manager at a mechanical engineering company, which he joined after he left 2013. “I spent over 26 years [in the civil sector]. If I wanted a chance at a second career, I couldn’t wait till I was too old,” he says.

His colourful resume also includes a brief year-long stint as a flight attendant with United Airlines in the early ’90s. “I got to travel and see the world a bit,” he recalls. “But I’ll be running my shop full-time by the end of this year. It’s just too tiring to work during the day and come back here to make ice cream at night.”

Zhi An candidly reveals that she had to take a huge pay cut to go into F&B. “I’m not paid even one-eighth of what I used to get at my former [teaching] job. We’re turning a small profit now, just enough to buy more ingredients and pay our rent (laughs). We were setting up our shop when I found out I was pregnant [with our second child], so it was a bit of a crazy time.”

They had to cut back on their personal expenses to become their own bosses. “No more holidays for us,” Greg declares. “When we were civil servants, our combined salaries were enough for us to take regular holidays, though nothing fancy. You have to make a lot of sacrifices when you’re running your own business. I don’t get to see my kids as often. Sometimes you work 13, 14 hours. You go home and open Facebook, see your friends enjoying themselves and think, ‘Is it all worth it?’ But it is lah. We’ve built something unique.”

The Dancing Elephant takes over a shop unit formerly occupied by Greek gyro joint Yeero Gyro. When 8days.sg dropped by, the owners were still in the midst of redecorating their space. “Some people walked by and were confused about what we were selling, ’cos there’s still a Yeero Gyro sign on the door and a kebab machine outside,” laughs Zhi An. There are tables with 23 seats outside the shop where customers can savour their ice cream on the spot. The biz is also a registered social enterprise; Greg and Zhi An currently employ staff with special needs to run the shop. “We want to help as many people as possible,” Greg says.

Other than ice cream-making, the couple also has a few other unusual talents (they met through their mutual fencing hobby before getting hitched). The shop’s signboard sports a charming elephant logo hand-drawn by Greg. “I like to doodle, but I always draw guy stuff like fighter jets. My wife asked me to draw her something more feminine. I like elephants, so she said, ‘Draw me an elephant in a tutu,’” he shares. The little illustration later became the face and name of their shop. Both animal lovers, they also adopted an elephant named Rajesh at a centre for rescued animals in India, while Zhi An is a volunteer horse-riding instructor in her free time.

Zhi An creates her ice cream flavours by experimenting with recipes found in “books and the Internet”. An avid traveller, she creates “international flavours” inspired by her trips, like a Greek-style Saffron Yogurt Sorbet, Italian-style Stracciatella (a milk-based ice cream with chocolate shavings) and Vietnamese Coffee infused with a hand-dripped brew.

She painstakingly makes each flavour over two to three days. “I hand-process the ingredients. Then they’re churned in an ice cream maker. They are very intentionally sourced with very specific types and brands; if one of the ingredients isn’t available, I’ve to come up with another flavour,” she says. She used to offer a Kaya flavour, but has since stopped as “it moves the slowest among all the flavours. I make the flavours that everyone wants”.

You can buy ice cream by the scoop in a cup (from $3.50 to $5), or add $1.50 for a house-made waffle cone ($1 for a regular factory-made cone). You can also tapow the ice cream home in tubs (from $12.50 to $18 for a pint).

This ain’t ice cream for kids; Zhi An’s sophisticated cold-smoked Valrhona dark chocolate flavour is studded with plump kirsch-soaked cherries and infused with very generous glugs of a 12-year-old Courvoisier cognac. She specially demonstrates to us the smoking of the ice cream in a bell jar with smouldering applewood (it’s usually done out of sight during the ice cream churning process). She plans to showcase the smoking process to customers upon order in the future, like what she did for us, when she has “more manpower”. The ice cream has a languidly smokey whiff, with a texture that’s decadently velvety and rich. We could taste the brandy’s heady fragrance and Valrhona’s smooth chocolate, while the whole cherries burst in our mouth with squirts of kirsh (cherry liqueur). Proper indulgence for grown-ups.

Zhi An cautions us that this atas flavour is a polarising one where “people either like it or they don’t”. It’s made with Greek yogurt, creamed honey (liquid and crystallised honey that have been combined and whipped to a creamy consistency) and liberally laced with strands of Indian saffron. We like it: the tangy concoction is not too sweet, and boasts a delicate honey note with a hint of saffron’s gentle floral fragrance.

Vietnamese coffee is laboriously dripped and steeped for a whole day to make this flavour. But we find the coffee hit not quite strong enough (Vietnamese coffee is traditionally more robust than the average cuppa), and the ice cream texture not as smooth compared to the other flavours.

This luxurious scoop is loaded with pure Mao Shan Wang purée, and is so intense, it tastes like we’re eating the king of fruits itself. One of the better MSW ice cream we’ve tried so far.

In a nutshell, this gelato flavour comprises vanilla ice cream with chocolate chips. But it’s far from basic; Zhi An’s version has house-made vanilla bean ice cream with ribbons of molten Valrhona dark chocolate (drizzled into the frozen ice cream as it churns to create crackly chocolate shards). A dense, milky treat that could give the version we tried in Italy a run for its money.

Vanilla ice cream swirled with hot fudge and coffee. It’s smooth and decent enough, though we personally don’t fancy this combination much. We ordered the ice cream with a freshly-made Belgian waffle ($7 a la carte), which is also unique: instead of the usual eggy type you find in every dessert cafe, the waffle mix here is spiked with yeast in the traditional way, which makes the disc lighter and airier with a crispier crust. It also has a mild, yeasty tanginess like European bread that makes it a good accompaniment for creamy ice cream flavours.

We’re pretty jaded about Speculoos anything at this point since it’s added to practically every dessert in Singapore, but The Dancing Elephant’s salt-spiked Speculoos flavour with crunchy biscuit bits is surprisingly delish. It’s umami, earthy and caramelly, and extremely addictive. Tapow this one home for an after-dinner treat. 

Besides exotic flavours, The Dancing Elephant also serves classic no-frills flavours like vanilla, and this Strawberry Jam sorbet made with fresh strawberries. There are gritty strawberry seeds in the mildly sweet, fruity concoction. Not bad, but we prefer to splurge some calories on the yummy house-baked Sea Salt Caramel Brownie ($3 a la carte), a dense, chocolatey square drizzled with dulce de leche and a sprinkling of sea salt.

This underrated ice cream joint in an obscure Balestier mall offers artisanal atas flavours priced similar to bigger mainstream chains like Udders and The Daily Scoop. But the ice cream here is better than its rivals’, and the flavours more interesting. Too bad the couple who runs it currently has no intentions of expanding, as they do everything themselves. But that’s what also makes their desserts consistently delish.  

The Dancing Elephant, #01-12 Zhongshan Mall, 20 Ah Hood Rd, S329984. Open daily 12pm-10pm. www.facebook.com/pg/dancingelephanticecream.

PHOTOS: MARK LEE