The story below is a preview 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.
Want to experience the vibrant flavors and nostalgic charm of Sips and Scoops, where Homestead Creamery meets Indian-inspired treats in Cave Spring? Check out the latest issue, now on newsstands, or see it for free in our digital guide linked below!
The story above is a preview from our July/August 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!