Location: 4300 Steeles Avenue East (inside Pacific Mall)
Website: https://www.instagram.com/illoscoopandflake/

I love gelato, but it’s always nice when a place mixes it up and serves stuff that isn’t the usual chocolate, hazelnut, pistachio, and on and on.

Enter: Illo Scoop and Flake, an interesting Korean-influenced gelato spot inside Pacific Mall.  As soon as I saw that they had a red bean flavour, I was sold.  Red bean desserts: great.  Gelato: great.  This is as close to a sure thing as it gets.

You can get the gelato with various toppings (which accounts for the “and Flake” part of the name, I guess), but I stuck with just the gelato on its own.

It’s quite tasty, with a very restrained level of sweetness and a subtle flavour that lets the milkiness of the gelato be the star of the show.  The red bean flavour is mostly in the background, but it’s definitely there, and becomes more apparent as you eat it.

The sweetness and red bean flavour are so understated that it took me a few mouthfuls to get on board, but the more I ate it, the more I enjoyed it.

The texture, too, is stellar — it’s maybe slightly thin, but it’s otherwise pleasantly smooth and creamy.

My only issue is that I wish the beans had been ground a bit more finely.  There are little flecks of red bean mixed in, and they add a graininess that detracts from the great smoothness of the gelato.  That’s a minor complaint, however.