At Houston’s SweetCup, Italian-style Gelato Gets a 713 Remix

Jasmine Chida was on her honeymoon in Italy in 2010 when she first fell in love with gelato. Enamored with its silky texture and potent seasonal flavors, she returned to Houston in search of a similar experience, but the search yielded few results. And so began Chida’s journey to make her own superlative gelato.

Starting in 2011, Chida worked to learn the science behind gelato-making. She read every book she could find on the frozen treat and experimented with her Cuisinart ice cream maker. “It was becoming a passion that never existed before,” she says. “I loved adding [to] and creating new flavors — it gave me so much pleasure.”

The gelato fascination only deepened when Chida returned to Italy to attend Carpigiani Gelato University, where she immersed herself in a cold world of frozen desserts and mastered the slow churn that results in gelato’s denser flavors and texture. A year later, Chida opened SweetCup in Montrose — serving rich, eclectic, Houston-centric flavors like the cult-favorite Malai kulfi, a creamy and cooling combination of cardamom and slivers of almond inspired by Indian ice creams, and the elaborate 713, a Space City homage comprised of Vietnamese coffee gelato, cayenne- and chocolate-covered Fritos, candied Texas pecans, double fermented soy sauce, saffron, and toasted black sesame.

Later this year, Chida’s gelato dreams will grow even bigger with the opening of SweetCup’s second location in Cypress — a franchise expansion.

Jaclyn Warren

Tucked into Cypress’s strip mall at 20711 Tuckerton Road, the new SweetCup, named for her father’s nickname for ice cream, will similarly offer a rotation of 48 imaginative flavors of gelato, sorbet, custard, and frozen yogurt, plus newer offerings like sundaes and homemade toppings. For a small business like SweetCup, a franchise location that requires financial, and, often, emotional buy-in from strangers, is a big deal. It’s a testament to how much the new owners, Cypress residents who are also longtime SweetCup fans, believe in her business, Chida says. “They see the vision of SweetCup. It says a lot about the product,” she adds.

SweetCup’s expansion is also a chance for Chida to further her mission of making gelato more “approachable” to Houstonians. “People don’t know enough about it, and it’s different from ice cream,” Chida says. Ice cream typically contains more air, resulting in a fluffier texture, and with its higher percentage of butter fat, which can coat the tongue, certain ingredients or flavors can be muted, Chida says. On the other hand, slowly-churned gelato contains less air and butter, resulting in a silkier, denser texture that is deeper in flavor.

All of SweetCup’s desserts contain real ingredients free from preservatives or fillers. The seasonal blueberry sangria, for example, includes real wine and blueberries Chida handpicks from a local farm. The robust huckleberry, a play on Chida’s fruit-full travels to Wyoming and Idaho, contains real berries. The pistachio gelato is loaded with nuts imported from Sicily, and the Turkish Coffee gelato is topped with crushed cardamom, a common addition to coffee, Chida learned, while visiting Turkey.

Amy Scott Photography

With Houston always being the starting point, many flavors are also a combination of nostalgic plays on Chida’s favorite places and a reflection of her mother’s thriftiness in the kitchen. “She was always so good at using what she had, and with Houston having so much culture, I want to use what we have,” she says. SweetCup offers vanilla tres leches, a take on one of the city’s favorite desserts, plus limited-edition flavors like toasted black sesame and turmeric mandarin, which nod to some of Houston’s prominent Asian diasporic cuisines. There’s refreshing and zingy key lime cilantro sorbet, a summery treat that pays homage to the lime salsa at Chida’s favorite San Antonio Mexican restaurant, the now-shuttered El Tio’s; dairy-free desserts, like the sorbets, which come in palate-cleansing flavors like grapefruit lavender; and the award-winning East Meets West, a buttery gelato filled with Texas candy pecans, local whiskey, and cardamom spice that serves as Chida’s fullest interpretation of what it means to live in and love Texas.

The San Antonio native continues to educate Houstonians about the beauty of gelato by consulting for restaurants on frozen desserts and hosting informative workshops and labs on gelato and entrepreneurship within the community at places like the Julia C. Hester House, nonprofit Girls, Inc., and the University of Houston’s Conrad N. Hilton College of Global Hospitality Leadership. In 2019, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner named July 30 Jasmine Chida Day in honor of her work in the community and her impactful gelato.

Jasmine Chida

Today, SweetCup continues to make its name in Houston, selling pints of its gelato in Whole Foods Market, and customizing flavors for local chefs and restaurants like Little’s Oyster Bar and Tony’s. But Chida’s gelato journey is far from over, she says. The SweetCup owner says she hopes to one day own dozens of shops throughout the South; Centering Houston, however, is still her M.O.

“There’s so many cultures here in Houston,” she says. “I just wanted to explore and showcase that.”

Christina Martinez Photography