Red Circle Ice Cream in Houston has brought back its signature crawfish flavor for the seventh straight spring, offering a limited-time sweet, savory, and spicy scoop at its Chinatown location just as crawfish season hits its peak.
The buttery, garlicky ice cream, garnished with spices and crowned with a whole chilled crawfish, is available only at the shop at 6838 Ranchester Dr. Owner Nickey Ngo first dreamed up the creation in 2019 after a family seafood boil left garlic butter dripping down her fingers.
“Thinking outside the box, I always try to create flavors that are unique, but at the same time that taste good … and flavor profiles that nobody has had in Houston,” Ngo told Chron.
The shop takes a Viet-Cajun approach, boiling live crawfish in melted butter, garlic, Cajun spices, and seasonings, then straining those juices and flavors into a sweet cream base before churning it smooth. The result blends dessert with the rich, buttery flavor profile of a Viet-Cajun crawfish boil.
“The secret ingredient to make it so creamy and so popping is butter — lots and lots of butter — so when you taste the crawfish, it’s not so salty. That butter makes it super creamy and adds a little bit of that sweetness as well, and it gives it that richness that you taste from the sauce when you eat crawfish,” Ngo said.
“The ice cream itself does not have crawfish bits in there, because no one wants to eat frozen bits of seafood. So that’s what we top it with, the crawfish, and then you eat the crawfish and the flavorings that are seasoned with the actual ice cream,” she added.
Ngo recommends twisting off the tail to eat the meat first, then using the head like a spoon to scoop the ice cream. She also suggests grabbing a chaser of a sweeter flavor first and skipping any kisses afterward.
The treat debuted as a one-week Spring Break special in 2019 and has returned annually because customers begin calling as early as late January asking for it. Ngo has no plans to add it permanently, preferring to keep it as a seasonal draw for foodies.
“This makes me feel so humbled and so blessed that people have come in and really wanted to try it,” Ngo said. “We’ve gotten some haters, of course … We were blasted when we first launched this flavor. They were like, ‘No, call the police. We’re gonna burn your store down.’ But it really made a lot of people excited, because they were like, ‘What in the world is? What are they doing?’ It piqued everyone’s interest, they came and a lot of people loved it.”
Since opening in 2017, Red Circle has created more than 100 specialty flavors as part of a “fusion of flavors” menu. Its four core scoops are chocolate, vanilla, Vietnamese coffee, and Elmo crunch, with a rotating lineup that has included horchata, lychee strawberry, Thai tea, and an upcoming mango sticky rice option. Scoops can be paired with churros or macarons.
While the shop now has multiple Houston-area locations, only the Chinatown spot is serving the crawfish ice cream this spring.