I had actually been here once before, a jillion years ago, but clearly hadn't reviewed it then. But…read morewe *remembered* it, anyway, so when, about a month ago, we made the journey out to Artesia to satisfy our desire for a quality Indian buffet (something Long Beach has been lacking in for quite some time), we made sure to save a bit of room for ice cream here - we're pretty spoiled with easy access to Long Beach Creamery, quite possibly the best ice cream on the planet, but while they always have fun and interesting flavors, they aren't *these* flavors. Sadly, I definitely did *not* save sufficient room for the item I most specifically remembered having gotten last time, their falooda, which I *certainly* can't get anywhere in Long Beach, my favorite sort of dessert, being ice cream with a kitchen sink's worth of fun toppings. A decade later I still remember how good that falooda was. Presumably they still are.
But we did have room for ice cream, at least a bit. They were happy to let us try as many flavors as we wanted, and there were a few I literally had no idea what they were - though some were just names for already-mixed variants, I learned, for instance, that "gulkand" is their rose ice cream with extra rose-petal candy (extremely tasty!), and that "chikoo" is actually the name of a fruit I'd never heard of (it tastes a lot like rich brown sugar, and goes particularly well with gulkand.) They were also happy to let us mix two flavors as half-scoops for a single scoop cup, and their single scoop cups are *quite* substantial. Long Beach Creamery is still my gold standard in craft ice cream, but everything about the ice cream here also tasted extremely real, made with actual fruits/candies/etc rather than mixes or "flavoring", and it's *almost* as close to the perfect creamy (not too airy or too dense) consistency that LB Creamery nails (Saffron Spot's is just *slightly* denser. Still extremely good. And way cheaper.)
Also of note, they have an actual, dedicated parking lot, and at least when we were there, Saturday afternoon about a month ago, there were plenty of parking spaces in it, which felt like a downright rarity for the immediate surrounding area.