Galata Turkish Ice Cream & Dessert

Long Beach sweet shop Galata Turkish Ice Cream & Dessert (aka Galata Ice Cream) isn’t well-known in Orange County. That should change. Having fallen in love with Persian ice creams at the OC and LA locations of Saffron & Rose, as well as its LA rival Mashti Malone’s, we’ve tried plenty of other versions across other OC ice cream shops, and none have surpassed them in famously stretchy, almost doughy textures – until we discovered Galata. Located only a block away from established Long Beach Lebanese restaurant Open Sesame in the Belmont Shore neighborhood, Galata Ice Cream is a sister concept to Galata Turkish Halal Grill, and commonly owned with Istanbul Home Decor – three neighboring businesses that offer a unique window into Turkish culture, crafts, and food. Their separate spaces can be a little confusing for first-time visitors – the decor store is inbetween the restaurant and dessert shop – but they’re collectively worth exploring.

Beautifully decorated with artificial cherry blossoms and roses inside and outside the front door, the Galata Ice Cream shop is built around a dondurma stand, a table that holds four kazans, cauldrons of elastic Turkish ice cream (known as dondurma) that can be pulled out and stretched like dough with a long-armed paddle. In Turkey, these stands are often used for fun, theatrical presentations where vendors tease customers with empty cones before handing off filled ones, but at Galata, guests can skip the show and just order by the bowl or cone from a collection of ice creams and sorbets. A single-scoop bowl is $6, and multi-scoop options are available for $9 to $11; flavors range from chocolate, chocolate chip, coconut, Oreo, and coffee to intense pistachio and even mastic gum, the latter enabling better tasting of the magical ingredient that enables the ice cream to stretch and hold shape. Fruit flavors range from common strawberry, mango, raspberry, and peach to more interesting options such as black mulberry and blackberry.

We’ve tried ice creams here ranging from pistachio and almond to chocolate and caramel – flavors that we’ve experienced countless times elsewhere. They’re actually special here: thanks to the mastic gum and bona-fide strong ingredients, the intensity of these flavors is remarkable, and the stretchiness of each spoonful of ice cream is obvious and fun, making texture an even bigger contributor to the “treat” than at Persian ice cream parlors we’ve visited. Galata’s servers typically just hand over ice cream bowls, but with cones, they do a quick upside-down twist of the cone that briefly demonstrates its adhesion, a nod to the theatrical presentation more common in Turkey.