Hip Ice Cream And Waffles With A Side Of Nostalgia At Leng Leng

If you’re wondering about the hip retro vibe of this lovely little dessert shop — think a red-striped ice cream counter and jars of old-school biscuits like iced gem cookies and crunchy peanut candy — that can be attributed to Shirlene’s artist daughter Samantha Lo, better known to Singaporeans as “sticker lady”.

Sam helped to conceptualise the design here. She also roped in a food consultant to come up with locally-inspired dessert recipes, such as pandan waffles and Milo Godzilla milkshakes. The 12-seat store is practically a hole in the wall, which means there’s barely any space for a kitchen. So aside from the waffles, which are made from scratch here, everything else is store-bought. Ice creams are sold from $3.20 for a single scoop. They come in flavours like plain vanilla, or the more local gula melaka.

Katherine Chew Leng Katt (left) and Shirlene Chew Leng Hwang helm this cute little dessert shop.

If you can’t resist the perfume of pandan waffles wafting from your humble heartland bakery, then you’re in for a treat. The version here is thinner, and tender within with a nice crisp crust. It comes with that same retro pandan flavour (pandan essence rather than freshly squeezed pandan leaves — but we’re not complaining). Again, you can choose your own ice cream flavours, and we went for the coconut and salted caramel. The one thing we didn’t love was the salted caramel ice cream, which had a rather artificial buttery taste.

Have your ice cream wrapped in a nostalgic slice of cottony rainbow bread at no extra cost. We had ours with a scoop of thick and rich vanilla ice cream (the sisters prefer not to say who supplies the ice cream they sell). The bread is everything we remember from our childhood — thin, fluffy, with a mild alkaline tang. Just biting into this simple sandwich made us happy.

We imagine that if you poured butter cake batter flecked with sandy sugee (semolina) into a waffle maker, this is what you’d get. The sugee waffle is toasty and light, with a lovely loose crumb. You can choose whatever flavour of ice cream you like, but we think the Horlicks, which has notes of malt powder, makes for a great match with the buttery waffle.

This was the Special Milkshake the day we visited. The sisters whiz up gula melaka and coconut ice creams with pulut hitam (glutinous black rice pudding) that they make from scratch. The result is a rich, luscious, and very filling milkshake that’s not too sweet and kissed with all the flavours of the traditional pulut hitam dessert.

The dessert flavours here are as inventive as they are delicious. We like that the ice cream they use is rich and creamy, rather than the air-filled variety many neighborhood ice cream parlours tend to peddle. $


#01-11, 116 Changi Rd. S419718. Open daily except Wed. Thur-Tues 1pm-10pm. Last orders at 9.45pm. www.facebook.com/lenglengicecream