After working as a propriety trader on Wall Street, Tanvi Chowdhri returned to Mumbai this January with one goal — to set up an ice-cream and dessert café. Her husband, Abhinav, who works in the family’s steel business, put in his engineering degree to work. “We create premium ice-cream prepared using the liquid nitrogen technique,” he explains. Papacream’s lower level is done up with white walls and bicycle-wheel-shaped stools. The mouth of three nitrogen taps opens into mixers placed on the main counter. They are the real heros that churn out fresh ice-cream. We take a taste test:

Mexicano Rs 250

We wonder if we are dining at a Mexican restaurant when we taste Mexicano, a scoop of cream cheese ice-cream served with crispy spinach, beet and plain tortilla chips. Sinfully cheesy, the minus 200 degree blast of liquid nitrogen smoothens the granules to create a velvety texture. The crunchy jalapeños pieces in the ice-cream leave a spicy tingle on the palate.