Creamier: This 15-year-old Toa Payoh ice cream cafe now bakes bread and backs social enterprises

If you live in Toa Payoh and have ever grumbled about the lack of good dessert spots nearby, you probably already know this one. Creamier Handcrafted Ice Cream and Coffee has been a mainstay and crowd favourite in the quaint neighbourhood since 2011. 

What’s new at the ice cream parlour now is a newly refurbished space, with a deli concept to boot, whipping up a gamut of fresh bakes — think sourdough loaves, hot sandwiches — and a growing list of local causes the home-grown shop is supporting.

“Ice cream makes people happy”

Creamier is the brainchild of three local creatives: Khoh Wan Chin, 50, Victor Lim, 50, and Audrey Wang, 51.

Wan Chin, whom we spoke to, had spent the decade before Creamier running Trine Design Associates, a design studio co-founded with her business partner Victor, when she was 24.

With youth at their back, the pair started the studio not long after the 1997 financial crisis and economic instability had rattled their confidence in steady employment. Going into business themselves seemed like the safer bet at the time. 

By 2011, she was ready to build something, though not necessarily ice cream, specifically. Her acquaintance-turned-fellow-founder Audrey Wang, who had left a career in advertising to pursue pastry making, and so affectionately dubbed the “Dessert Queen” amongst the trio, had wanted to run an ice cream shop since she was a child.

Then, in the most serendipitous of ways, Wan Chin came across an empty unit in one of Singapore’s oldest heartlands: Toa Payoh Lorong 1. 

Located amidst an old Indian barber, a hair salon and an incense shop, it was situated underneath a HDB block — an unlikely spot to open an ice-cream shop. But for the trio, the quaint little unit felt right. 

Creamier stayed there for close to eight years, before the trio moved across the road to their current unit in 2019. 

“Ice cream makes people happy. Running a happy business excites me,” Wan Chin says, looking back on the decision, 15 years later. She thinks of her two children, then still toddlers, ice cream dripping down their wrists faster than she could catch it with a napkin.

“At the time, it probably seemed quite random. We just wanted to create something we enjoyed — good food, good vibes and a place that made people happy. We’re very glad it worked out,” she added.

Two kinds of cold

During Creamier’s early years, the team stumbled upon a discovery: ice cream churned fresh and served immediately, at around -6°C to -7°C (pun not intended), has a completely different mouthfeel from hard-pack ice cream scooped out of a deep freezer at around -13°C. 

It was softer, less icy, and because Creamier worked with real dairy milk, cream, eggs and fruit purees rather than commercial mixes, the flavours came through more vibrantly too.

“It was ice cream at its freshest. For us, it was a complete game-changer,” Wan Chin explains.

The problem was bringing that experience to customers. Tabletop machines that churn continuously weren’t an option: much like making butter, constant agitation risked overworking a mixture built on real cream, altering its texture and dulling the very quality they were trying to preserve. 

The parlour at Toa Payoh didn’t have the space to solve that problem properly, so the idea sat shelved for a while. 

The chance came when a much bigger unit opened up in Chip Bee Gardens, and Sunday Folks launched in 2014 as Creamier’s sibling brand.

“Creamier was always the neighbourhood ice cream cafe,” Wan Chin says. 

A case in point: the sea salt gula Melaka was Wan Chin’s own local spin on salted caramel, arriving at a time when few artisanal ice cream brands here were reaching for Southeast Asian flavours. 

It remains a favourite alongside roasted pistachio and earl grey lavender, while Creamier still launches new flavours monthly. There’s nostalgic sesame tang yuan, Horlicks chocolate chip, and even a new strawberry matcha.

 “There is always a balance between comfort and curiosity at Creamier,” she adds.

“On the other hand, Sunday Folks gave us the space to be more experimental and to explore desserts in a different way.” These experiments include sweets, such as marshmallow and honeycomb, which have been made from scratch and paired alongside its ice cream.  

A decade later, Sunday Folks closed its Holland Village outlet in February 2024 and its Ion Orchard space wound down afterward in June 2024. 

Today, besides its Toa Payoh outlet, Creamier has a footprint across the heartlands, such as Tiong Bahru, Punggol Northshore and Margaret Market.

Creamier at Toa Payoh now has a deli

If you haven’t been to the Toa Payoh haunt in a while, expect to see a refreshed shop when you walk in. Gone is the dimly lit, slightly cramped cafe regulars will remember. The current unit has opened the space up considerably with more seats available. You can even watch the bakers at work, too. 

Creamier’s on-site bakery doles out sourdough daily, alongside shokupan, viennoiseries and pastries (more on these later) too. According to Wan Chin, the spelt & flaxseed (S$9.50) and Country sourdough (S$8.90) loaves have already built a following.

While Wan Chin remains tight-lipped on what all this cost to build, she doesn’t pretend that this expansion is risk-free. After all, she has watched enough of the F&B scene to know that customer love doesn’t guarantee survival. 

“Many businesses do not fail because founders lack passion,” she says on the vicissitudes of the F&B sector. “They fail because the economics eventually stop making sense.” 

Rent, manpower and margins don’t get easier just because a new sando sells well in its first month, and she’s clear that growth for its own sake isn’t the goal. 

The bet, as she sees it, only pays off if the new menu is built with the same care the ice cream always was.

Part of the new deli menu now features hot food: sarnies, a burger, and even mac & cheese. Sweet tooth loyalists needn’t worry, though. The ice cream and waffles that built Creamier’s name are still very much on the menu.

Supporting local businesses

Wan Chin and her team have also made it a point to support local businesses.

The shop has backed IAmCatBee since 2020, and lent support to Organisation of Illustrators Council Singapore and Urban Sketchers along the way. It’s also worked commercially with bigger names — Changi Airport, Tong Heng, and Kim Guan Guan among them —  testament that a Toa Payoh ice cream shop can sit at the same table as big brands, without losing the neighbourhood instincts. 

“Purposeful work, to me, goes beyond profits. It is about building something meaningful from ground zero,” says Wan Chin. “From sourcing ingredients and working with local suppliers and coffee roasters, to hiring from the community and collaborating with local artists and social causes, these are things that matter deeply to us.”

They also procure organically grown pearl oysters and abalone oyster mushrooms (and stock up on flavoured pearl oyster mushroom chips) from Mushroom Buddies, an initiative under local co-operative Employment for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities. 

The co-operative hires people with special needs, and was mostly founded by parents of children with special needs themselves. Its mushrooms are harvested fresh from container farms at Sprout Hub in Henderson.

“As a mother, I resonated strongly with the realities and challenges of caring for children with special needs. We wanted to explore how we could collaborate and support their cause in a meaningful way,” Wan Chin, who first discovered Mushroom Buddies from a social media video, says. 

When asked if the team would experiment with creating mushroom flavoured ice cream, Wan Chin laughs off the idea, quipping that the idea might be one adventure too far.

What’s on offer at Creamier, these days?

A small hill of Mushroom Buddies’ plump mushrooms (S$4) also comes perched atop Creamier mac & cheese (S$12). A trio of cheeses — mozzarella, cheddar, and grana padano — is tossed among the macaroni and then melted as it bakes, until the top turns the colour of an old penny. It arrives bubbling and blistered, fogging up my glasses.

That plumpness comes at a cost. Mushrooms this juicy release their liquid once heat hits them, and here it pools a little at the top. We’ll let it slide. 

The mushrooms give up some bite, but not flavour: buttery, with a thin liquorice note under a wave of umami. That earthiness also complements the three cheeses; we are fond of the cheddar’s sharpness and the grana padano’s nuttiness.  

The Bread Butter Jam (from S$8) is a choice of shokupan or sourdough, lightly toasted, served with butter and jam, with the option to build it out into a heartier plate with sides. 

We added on Mushroom Buddies’ mushrooms (S$6), cooked in fragrant truffle oil, for good measure. The butter on our visit came blueberry-flecked, fruit folded into a salted, creamy base — an acquired taste if you ask us. Both options of shokupan or sourdough are good to munch on.

The roast beef stack (S$18) piles in-house slow-roasted beef, caramelised onions and cheddar into warm focaccia, with a handful of rocket for something green to point to. The focaccia is dense, chewy but crumbly, with a good olive oil soak. The beef, however, is chewy and unyielding.

Imagine the classic black glutinous rice dessert reimagined as a pastry: sweet pulut hitam filling is encased within buttery, shattering layers. This pulut hitam pain suisse (S$5.50) has a smart bit of cross-cultural engineering, and one to grab before the tray empties. 

Traditionalists would frown at the pistachio kunafa shio pan (S$5). Chocolate hardens over soft, mildly salted shio pan, cracking like the top of a creme brulee on first bite, and inside, pistachio kunafa waits in shredded, buttery threads. It’s a very, if not overly, sweet number.

Creamier’s kimchi gochujang focaccia (S$7.50) is oil-slicked in every dimple, wedges of tangy kimchi piled on top, gochujang drizzled across in bright red streaks. The dough underneath stays soft and open-crumbed, holding firm under all that weight without turning soggy. We love this tangy and spicy combination.

Sweet, fluffy shokupan, lightly toasted, cradles a creamy tuna filling under a layer of torched mentaiko in the mentaiko tuna sando (S$16). The mentaiko’s brine and salt were a tad overpowering but smoky.

Creamier’s sea salt gula Melaka (S$5.50 for a scoop), the shop’s own local spin on the classic salted caramel, still tastes like conviction. Thick, luscious scoops carry gula Melaka’s smoky sweetness against a hit of salt. 

A premium flavour that earns the top-up, roasted pistachio (S$7.30) is reminiscent of smoky hojicha tea. It’s also luscious and superbly nutty in equal measure. 

You can also opt to have this classic flavour with fresh baked waffles (from S$13.20 with a single scoop of classic ice cream), which boasts a golden brown exterior and superbly fluffy interior.

What stays with us after a meal at Creamier isn’t just the ice cream, though the sea salt gula Melaka alone warrants a trip back.

It’s the sense that every new bake or dish, mushrooms included, is doing double duty: feeding a hungry regular, and at the same time, making room for someone who needs the work. 

15 years in, that’s not a bad thing for a neighbourhood ice cream shop to become.

This was a hosted tasting.

For more ideas on what to eat, check out our review of Hup Lok, a seafood restaurant serving up a fish soup that’s just to die for, or our latest visit to Meadesmoore steakhouse for its award-winning full-blood wagyu striploin.