05 Jul 2023
Christopher Place Shopping Centre is proud to once again welcome exotic ice cream parlour Darlish for the foreseeable future. Laura Bill had the enviable job of tasting samples while finding out more about the shop and its founder.
Unable to find the ice cream flavour she craved, Darlish founder and owner Laura Dawson took the plunge and started making it in her kitchen.
Laura, 36, who is half-Iranian and half-Indian, loved an occasional saffron, rose and pistachio but found it was not available anywhere locally.
Realising she was quite good at crafting ice cream, she experimented with other quirky flavours and before she knew it she was pushing around an exquisite-looking Italian wooden cart at markets and fairs and doing quite well out of it.
“I initially dabbled with desserts like panna cotta and cheesecakes, which I sold to Selfridges, but I soon realise I couldn’t scale them up sufficiently to meet demand, and ice cream was much easier.”
That was in 2017, and before too long she had opened her first premises in French Row at the site of the former Ye Olde Sweet Shoppe.
“It was a massive gamble at the time, but as queues formed down the street I kept asking myself, ‘Surely there aren’t still more customers?’” she recalled.
Now Laura owns four Darlish parlours, employing loyal staff who come back year-after-year before, through and after university.
“They are the backbone of our business,” she explained. “The training is quite intensive, with two weeks on scooping practice alone.”
Another part of the Darlish induction is trying every flavour (if they can) and being able to describe the tastes and textures. I can think of worse jobs!
Away from the shops, Laura can frequently be found in her wellies at the dairy farm in North London where the magic happens.
“It’s a frantic production process. We produce 900 litres of ice cream at a very quick rate, and then it takes a further two days per flavour.
“Taste and texture are all important,” she explained. “Companies like Unilever spend years working on the consistency of their products. We have to let the flavours seep into our ice cream.”
We visited the St Albans branch in Christopher Place to learn more about the production process and try a selection of flavours because to not do so would quite frankly have been ridiculous!
The menu has a core range of options plus a specials section which changes sporadically. Exciting cones such as rainbow and chocolate-dipped ones grab my attention far more than the only cones in existence when I was growing up – the coral orange, tasteless wafer ones which aren’t really robust enough to deal with any drippage or dysfunctional child incidents.
You can of course also opt for a small tub and a plastic thingy to eat with. To be honest I have long been a fan of the tub as it feels a bit more grown-up (You know for when you turn up with an ice-cream at a job interview or court or something ;-p).
I like a nice, safe know-what-I’m-getting flavour, preferring such choices like salted caramel or sour cream and cherry, rather than risking the more out-there lemon and poppyseed, but I’m urged to take a risk and try something different.
We tried sticky taffini – a sticky toffee pudding caramel sauce and sesame – orange blossom (very Jo Malone) and rhubarb, pomegranate and rose.
I was genuinely a bit nervous because I really am not usually a fan of flowers in my mouth and associate the taste of rose or violet with soap. But it was SO refreshing and moreish, and Laura said it is carefully balanced for a Western palate.
The sticky toffee pudding one was stunning, offering the texture of the cake in the ice cream with a subtly changing flavour. The orange blossom one with candied orange and orange blossom flower was a joy. Well worth experimenting then!
A younger crowd of customers has recently popped up at the shop, visiting after school and at weekends, meaning Saturdays are now staffed by at least eight people with queues often out of the door, proving a great draw for Christopher Place!
I briefly spoke to Molly, 25, who has worked at the St Albans pop-ups for years. Molly, whose current favourite flavour is peanut butter choc chip, said she loves working there and described Laura as “lovely but strict on good things like making sure no one with allergies has any incidents”.
Laura said that the locations of the pop-up stores are often sorted out at what might appear to be ‘the last minute’ due to the nature of letting a space in popular St Albans. “Customers often remark that they did not realise we were back. One said: ‘You know it’s summer when Darlish is here again!’,” she says proudly.
Carrot milk ice-cream is the soon-to-be-launched flavour currently being perfected. A lot of peeling apparently.
I probe a little to try and understand the science. (Who knew ice cream was a science? I wish we had had that at school!) It seems to be a lot of milk from an actual dairy, a long amount of perfecting texture, fabulous flavour-crafting and then a move from cow to store via a few different temperatures containers from -25 to -12 when it is served.
I asked what her secret to success is: “I never plan anything. I try not to look at the queues and focus on what I am doing in the moment. Sometimes I can’t believe it really.”
What I sense she is saying is that she doesn’t get lost in the dream or freaked out by the onslaught of customers.
Laura obviously does plan things and is clearly a phenomenal business woman who is admired by her staff, but the steely determination in her eyes juxtaposes with her humility.
As a woman myself I find it a refreshing change from the ego and chest-banging that sometimes accompany the alpha business model. (Did I just say that out loud? Yes, I think I did.) There is just something powerful when action is coming from the top down – when the backstory is fascinating, the drive is evident and the proof of the pudding is literally in the eating.
Laura visits ice cream venues all over the world to keep her eye on what’s going on, and recently came back from eight parlours in New York. Her take-away was that if the ice-cream is amazing but there is no customer engagement then it isn’t such a great experience. Laura had an egg yolk flavoured ice cream and said she had really wanted to know a bit of the story behind it.
“Give me a story and tell me the provenance!” she urges.
“It sort of sells itself if it is nicely decorated and so on, but the ice cream itself will be what brings people back and I suppose that is a true mark of a brilliant product, perhaps? That you can spring it up suddenly and it does well.”
Of course, Darlish has its regulars, as she explained: “Couples come to us for a date and then hit it off and decide to get married, invite us to serve at their wedding and in a year or two we see them craving a specific flavour during pregnancy and then they are in with their baby and their mum friends enjoying us.”
(Disappointment disclaimer: I cannot confirm this will happen if you take your date to Darlish but I strongly suggest the ice cream will not disappoint!)
They can also claim a host of celebrity customers. Captain Marvel Brie Larsson visited St Albans when filming at Hatfield House recently, with other big names including fashion designer Donnatella Versace, British boxer Anthony Joshua, actor Rosamund Pike and even the Princess of Brunei.
Over the past eight years Darlish has become intrinsically linked to St Albans, something the former Nicholas Breakspear pupil is proud she has achieved, and hopefully we will continue enjoying its remarkable flavour combinations from Christopher Place for many more years to come.
Find out more about Darlish at https://darlish.com/
