On the second floor of a strip mall by Vanderbilt’s medical campus, near an electronics store and a vacant building that used to house a pizza joint, there are remarkable things happening with ice cream and chai.
We’ll get to the ice cream, but let’s start with the chai. You’ll find several varieties on the menu at Sarabha’s Creamery, a café founded in 2021 by Gursharan Singh and his wife, Manpreet Gill. They make the blends themselves—from classic masala to turmeric to lemon to rose—because when they moved to the U.S. from India, they struggled to find tea that reminded them of home.
“My wife has grown up having good chai,” Singh told me during a recent visit to his shop. “She says, ‘No, I want it very specific. These spices. Those spices.’ So, we make what we like.”
The preparation is as distinct as the flavor. At Sarabha’s, the baristas pour the chai into a small metal pot and place it in a bed of heated sand. Then they run the pot in lazy patterns through the sandbox, creating a type of beverage ballet. After it comes to rest, the pot sits in the sand for several more minutes, to even out the heat, before the tea is finally poured into a cup.
In my experience, you then need to listen to at least one pop song playing quietly on the store’s stereo system before the chai is cool enough to drink.
And then, bliss. The flavor is strong and distinct, with only a hint of sweetness. The taste—particularly the turmeric—lingers on the palate, and the tea stays hot so long that the final sip is as soothing as the first.
This method is partially cribbed from Turkish coffee makers, who use heated sand, but it’s also inspired by Singh’s youth in India. (He grew up in the village of Sarabha, in Punjab.) “Back home my mother would put the container on coals and let it simmer a long time,” he said. “We can’t use coals here because it’s a fire hazard, but we also like the sand.”
He acknowledged that his method takes longer than most Americans expect. “Proper chai takes a little time to make,” he said. “Our audience understands that. So now they call before, or they plan to sit here for a few minutes while they wait.”
Frankly, the waiting enhances the pleasure. The café is quiet, filled with comfortable seating, and dotted with chessboards for folks who really want to hunker down. It’s a place that beckons visitors to stay a while. And besides, the anticipation adds meaning to the whole affair. The prep time and the cooling time make the chai something more than a beverage to be slurped while you’re checking your email. It’s fitting that Singh calls his customers his “audience,” because he pulls them into a ritual.
Patrons have noticed.
“I come at least once a week,” said Akshaya Annampedu, an undergrad at Vanderbilt who’s originally from Texas. “The chai they make here reminds me of the chai my mom makes back home. She actually puts in a lot of ginger to add that extra flavor. I appreciate that they have that as an option here. They’re authentic to how it’s supposed to be made.”
The authenticity matters to Vivek Surti, who has gained national attention for Tailor, his South Asian American restaurant in Germantown. His menu there highlights dishes that he ate growing up in Nashville as a first-generation American raised by Indian parents. Or to put it another way, he ate the Indian food that people eat in India, not the Westernized dishes that are served in most Indian restaurants in the U.S.
Surti stressed that most Nashvillians don’t know what chai is meant to be. First off, chai means “tea with milk,” so the term “chai tea latte” is as redundant as “ATM machine.” But that’s not the worst part.
“Let me tell you,” Surti said. “Most of the chai in this town: it sucks. It’s supposed to be an amazing drink, and not this super sweet, vanilla-y, creamy kind of thing.” That’s why he sells his own chai blend at Tailor, and it’s why he’s glad Sarabha’s offers their version, too.
“The fact that they’re doing it is great, because it’s a representation of things they missed,” he said. “They’re bringing a taste of home.”
Which brings us to the ice cream. As a youngster, Singh helped his mother make it, using milk from his family’s water buffaloes. He kept it up when he went to college. “I lived in a youth hostel, and we had a lot of time,” he recalled. “So, after classes or on the weekends, I started making ice cream.”
By the time he moved to Nashville in 2015 to work as a software developer, he was still making treats for his friends and family. He and his wife discussed opening a food stall, but it was all just talk until they noticed their current space was available.
“It was never a thing we needed to start doing commercially, but somehow it happened,” Singh said, laughing. “We were not business-minded at all. When we started here, we didn’t have any idea what to do. We just started.”
Along with the chai, they stood out by offering the only freshly made, Indian-style ice cream in town. Indian ice cream is distinguished by its richness and its density, which comes partly from the milk’s high fat content and partly from its preparation. Singh likes the milk to be simmered for several hours on low heat, similar to a process used for an Indian dairy food called khoya.
This aids both the taste and the consistency, which is especially obvious when you order a kulfi, a traditional frozen dessert that Sarabha’s serves as a type of ice cream popsicle. The ice cream in the kulfis isn’t whipped at all, which creates a decadent texture and a concentrated flavor explosion.
The scooped ice cream isn’t quite as intense, but it’s still sumptuous. Notably, the only ingredients are milk, sugar, and fresh versions of whatever flavors are added.
“I think the ice cream just tastes better,” said Valentin Barrera-Vinha, a high schooler who visits Sarabha’s with his friends. “The coconut’s my favorite because it really tastes like coconut, and it’s not too sweet.”
Just like he hoped they’d wait for their chai, Singh hoped his customers would try ice cream flavors like chai spice and saffron pistachio.
“I wasn’t sure the audience would accept it, but then saffron pistachio has been the most selling flavor for us,” he said. “That gave me a lot of happiness, because we are trying to do something that is not available easily here.”
That tracks with Surti’s experience.
“There’s this inherent assumption that Americans, or people who are not Indian, will never be able to eat the Indian food we eat at home,” he said. “What I’ve found is that as people try things, they find more and more connection with them. The food of home tastes like home no matter what home you come from.”
He’s determined to get local palates accustomed to this food.
“I put dishes on the menu that are like the dishes we had at home,” he said. “I can’t really ‘interpret’ them because people don’t understand the dishes enough for me to do a play on them. First, we need to introduce the food, and then maybe 40 years from now, somebody can do a play on it.”
We’ll have to wait, then, for Nashville to develop a fully refined appreciation for Indian food. But we can savor the time it takes to get there.
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