The story below is from our July/August 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Sips and Scoops brings Homestead Creamery ice cream, boba tea and Indian-inspired flavors to Cave Spring.
Courtesy of Sips & Scoops
An ice cream flight delights.
Layla Khoury-Hanold
Pistachio almond ice cream.
Stepping into an ice cream shop always holds a delicious, joy-filled promise, but there’s something especially cheery about Sips and Scoops. There are the boldly painted walls in shades of Tiffany blue, yellow and purple, the inviting medley of orange chairs and café tables and the ample assortment beckoning from the freezer cases. Here, the hardest decision of the day is choosing which flavor you want and how many scoops. Or maybe you’re in the mood for a nostalgia-inducing milkshake, sampling boba tea or trying falooda, a specialty Indian drink. At Sips and Scoops, you can have it all.
Sips and Scoops, which opened in the former Here’s the Scoop space in the Oak Grove Plaza last summer, is a welcome addition to Cave Spring, especially since co-owners Mina Patel and Hiral Vaishnav opted to first fill the cases with Homestead Creamery ice cream. You’ll find perennial favorites like espresso chocolate chip, Hokie Tracks (vanilla with salted caramel and chocolate-covered pretzel pieces) and Hokie Sunset Swirl (vanilla swirled with mango-tangerine and studded with vanilla cookie pieces), as well as seasonal scoops such as lemon crunch.
Layla Khoury-Hanold
An original Beano-ccino.
Next, Vadilal ice cream will grace the case, highlighting Indian-inspired flavors like coconut malai, orange-pineapple, custard apple (a seasonal tropical fruit also known as sitaphal), kaju draksh (a vanilla base with cashews and raisins) and rajbhog kulfi (infused with saffron and cardamom and strewn with a medley of nuts). The ice cream menu will also get a gourmet glow-up in the way of ice cream nachos, featuring scoops or soft serve vanilla, chocolate or swirl, with waffle chips baked in-house and choice of dipping sauce and one topping.
Patel and Vaishnav, who have been friends for over 20 years, had been thinking of opening a business together for a few years. “Me and Mina, we both have a passion for cooking, decorating, garnishing stuff, so that was the interest that started for both of us,” Vaishnav says. “We both have a second job, so we have a passion for us to do something for ourselves that we can both enjoy.”
Though neither of them have prior food operations experience, the idea of an ice cream shop offered a creative business outlet for their interests as well as the opportunity to create a community-minded scoop shop of their own. “It brought me back to childhood memories,” Patel says, remembering the mom-and-pop shops that populated the New Jersey neighborhood she grew up in. “There are subdivisions right behind it where kids can walk here and parents don’t have to worry crazily on how far they’re going or crossing a major road.”
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Layla Khoury-Hanold
Falooda is a refreshing milk-rose syrup beverage that's popular in the owners' native city of Gujarat.
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Layla Khoury-Hanold
The shop's cheerful interior sets up the just-right vibes for ice cream.
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Layla Khoury-Hanold
Ice cream cases await those seeking sweets.
Layla Khoury-Hanold
Customers leave well wishes, affirmations, notes and doodles on the shop's Post-It wall.
Local support has been swift, as evidenced by the Jenga blocks displayed by the register where customers wrote well wishes in the shop’s early days, a tradition that has spilled over onto a colorful Post-It wall. The back-wall-mounted chalkboard, a carryover from Here’s the Scoop, also has positive affirmations and doodles scrawled on its surface. The pair hopes that Sips and Scoops will become an anytime hangout as well as a gathering place for special occasions; they have plans to host private events and birthday parties, either in the back party room or in the main space during off-shop-hours.
Sips and Scoops is truly a family affair — members of both owners’ families had input on the décor and helped taste-test, and Vaishnav’s daughter, Deeya, and Patel’s son, Amar, helped get the shop operational during its first season. They received deliveries, helped decorate, ran social media, wrote schedules, delivered checks and opened and closed the shop all summer.
Layla Khoury-Hanold
The author's daughter is a fan of Homestead Creamery's chocolate and strawberry scoops.
Deeya was also the one who suggested adding boba tea, aka bubble tea, a tea-based beverage with chewy tapioca pearls. Boba is what initially inspired the sips part of the business’ name, but a specialty beverage called falooda deserves equal billing. Both Patel’s and Vaishnav’s family roots are in Gujarat, a city on India’s western coast where falooda is a popular summer-time drink. It’s crafted with a base of cold milk and rose syrup (which is said to help cool down the body), then augmented with ice cream, tukmaria seeds (aka basil seeds, which are touted for their health properties) and falooda sev, corn vermicelli noodles (which Patel says don’t break down as quickly as regular vermicelli). Here, you can opt to have your drink topped with cashews, pecans or pistachios. The next drink to join the sips line-up will be what Patel has dubbed a Beano-ccino, a riff on Baskin-Robbins’ and Dunkin Donuts’ Cappuccino Blast© that blends your choice of ice cream with ice and freshly made instant Nescafé into a sweet, frothy, caffeine-laced pick-me-up. Rounding out the menu are milkshakes, which can be customized with up to three flavors of ice cream.
Opening an independent shop, versus a franchise, has allowed the pair to continue experimenting with new menu ideas — which is part of the fun, too. Patel and Vaishnav have talked about adding more Indian-inspired creations, like mango lassi or chikoo-flavored ice cream, made with a caramelly-sweet, soft fruit that’s popular in India. They recently served the ice cream at a local trade show for Asian American Business Owners Association (Patel serves on their board), which included catering ice cream and desserts for 600 people. The pair hope to do more catering in the future and make custom scoops upon request, like a falooda-inspired one.
“Ice cream is like one of my favorite things. It’s what I love and what I can potentially build a community with,” Patel says. “Our goal is to have it be a little hangout spot and kids can just hang around with friends and enjoy.”
The story above is from our July/August 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!