Minus Eighteen Has All the Ice Cream Flavours You Can Dream of

We’ve heard rumours that a café in Dubai makes zaatar-flavoured ice cream, amongst other crazy concoctions. It was, at first, impossible to believe. Then we saw it for ourselves: a Lebanese woman scooping the zaatar ice cream in question into a freshly baked croissant. It didn't end there - before our eyes we watched as she sprinkled sumac and drizzled olive oil all over it. Naturally, we had to speak to her.

“I like dessert,” Yasmina Rezk, the founder of Minus Eighteen, told us. “Everyone loves ice cream since birth. Because there are so many nationalities in Dubai, we had to create a lot of flavours. Some for Europeans, some for Arabs, and some that are just for everybody.”

Minus Eighteen’s menu is a 34-page mammoth of dessert options, making it impossible - or at least statistically improbable - for anyone to feel left out. They serve saffron and miskeh ice cream scoops alongside a full eclair bar. A particular fan favourite is their maffroukeh sticks, which consist of Aleppo pistachio on mastic ice cream on a popsicle, covered in a thick layer of chocolate that is then, again, adorned with pistachio. As Rezk told us more and more about the delicacies they whisk up at the ice cream parlour, we found ourselces making promises to visit the store and Lebanon and wherever else she went that contributed to the creation of her Wonka-esque wonderland of culinary explorations. 

When asked how they manage to cover so many fronts, Rezk said, “I always tell my team in the kitchen: Put your heart into everything you do, in your life as well as in Minus Eighteen. The customer can always feel it.”

Rezk’s advice makes sense, considering that every single ice cream scoop in the shop, even something as basic as vanilla, is made by hand. The entire 34-page menu is artisanal, handcrafted by chefs from real ingredients. Real fruits. Real, pure zaatar that Rezk carries in from Lebanon. “Our ingredients are our number one priority. Everything has to be fresh if we want the flavour to feel real. We don’t add any preservatives or any colouring.”

The name Minus Eighteen has a playful energy to it, and much like their culturally informed flavours, that playfulness contains a surprisingly educational centre. As it turns out, Minus Eighteen is actually how the ice cream parlour preserves its treats: at an ideal -18 degrees Celsius. 

The reason Rezk seems to run Minus Eighteen like she was born to do so, is because this is actually not her first rodeo. She also runs an artisanal ice cream parlour in her home country, Lebanon, called Le Flocon. Her frozen treats empire has since grown, to the point that Rezk actually supplies some of the biggest restaurants in the UAE with their ice cream needs. 

While she is experienced, Rezk is nowhere near done learning. “I believe the sky’s the limit. There’s so much creativity in Minus Eighteen. If we go to an event, and it’s successful, we know we’re never going to do the same thing again. There’s always room for a twist.”