Saratoga News

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Carolyn Nguyen of Tin's Folded Ice Cream serves coffee to Jackie Glass of Saratoga.

Folded ice cream offers good things in the middle

By Suzanne Cristallo

For 30 years it's been an ice cream and candy store. The store at the south end of Big Basin Way in Saratoga has served sweet things from a freezer or a jar for as long as most folks can remember.

Now there's a new wrinkle in ice cream presentation offered by new owner Tin Phan. It's called folded ice cream--a method of inserting whatever good thing a customer fancies between folds of ice cream.

"Lots of customers favor vanilla ice cream with Reese's peanut butter cup," says Phan, who bought the former Coffee Grounds from Hal Bain last winter. The store serves cappuccino and a variety of other special coffees as well as candy, ice cream, bagels and pastries.

While Phan continues to offer gelato at his shop, now called Tin's Folded Ice Cream, he also is serving the famous Santa Cruz Marianne's ice cream. Four ounces of the former runs $2.75; the same-size scoop of Marianne's is $1.55.

Phan says he first came across the idea of folded ice cream in 1989. Variations of the idea have involved putting both ice cream and topping in a machine to produce a smoothie with a pulverized candy mix. Phan believes nothing surpasses his method, which involves taking chunks of Heath bar or Reese's or Hershey Bar and burying them in a cranny of dense ice cream served in a freshly baked waffle cone.

Phan, 30, bought the store just four months after buying another shop he calls the Coffee Stop in San Jose. Having both stores is the realization of an intuition he had in high school about his future as an entrepreneur. He's on the road from his home in San Leandro before 6 a.m. each morning to open his San Jose store, where he works until 4 p.m. Then he commutes to his Saratoga store, where he stays until closing.

Born in Saigon, where his father worked for the South Vietnamese state department, Phan fled with his mother and three of his six siblings to the United States during the fall of Saigon in 1974. They stayed with relatives in Virginia, where Phan went to school, learning English with a charming Southern accent. Two older sisters who settled in Mountain View insisted he visit them while he was attending George Mason University. Their motive was matchmaking, a tradition in Vietnamese families. Since Phan felt college was wrong for him, the offer of a job in Salinas with HomeTown Buffet coupled with his sisters' matchmaking overtures brought him to California.

"It just didn't work out," Phan recalls of the love mismatch and the long commute from Mountain View to Salinas. But it did firm up his desire to remain in the restaurant business locally, where he has worked for the past seven years.

Phan offers an unusual Vietnamese sandwich at his shop, which comes from customers seeing him eating one on his lunch break. It is the VCS--Vietnamese Chicken Sandwich--made with shredded barbecued chicken on a French baguette spread with a mixture of mayonnaise and butter, topped with shredded carrots and jicama marinated in vinegar and sugar, with cucumber, cilantro and hot peppers.

Before 4 p.m., customers may be served by Phan's assistant, Carolyn Nguyen, a recent graduate of San Jose State University in computer science whom Phan met without the help of his sisters. The couple will announce their engagement in July at a grand gathering of the families in traditional Vietnamese fashion.

Tin's Folded Ice Cream, 14567 Big Basin Way, Saratoga. Open Mon.-Sat. 8 a.m.- 9:30 p.m., Sun. 8 a.m.-6 p.m. 872-0810.

[ Back to Contents Page | Saratoga News Home Page | Archives ]