The Cone Tastes Like Thyme

A scoop of white chrysanthemum on a thyme-scented waffle cone is one of those menu items that should not survive a second tasting.

That is the problem Birds of Paradise has been answering, in scoop form, since it opened in July 2016. Floral and herbal gelato. White chrysanthemum. Basil. Sea salt hojicha. Macadamia butterfly pea. Lychee raspberry. Read cold, the flavour list has the rhythm of a brand chasing the chef-y conversation instead of the fruit and chocolate people actually queue for. The list is also accurate. The shop has been doing what the list says for nearly a decade, and the flavours have not been the soft, polite versions a less serious operation would have produced.

The basil tastes like basil. The white chrysanthemum tastes like white chrysanthemum. The cone, baked in-house from a thyme-infused dough, tastes like thyme. Using actual botanicals at concentrations you can recognise is the shop's whole commitment, and it's also why the original Katong counter has grown into a seven-outlet operation across the city without diluting the menu.

I went to the East Coast Road counter on a Sunday late afternoon because that is when the shop is at its working busiest, and because the real test for a gelato operation that has scaled is whether the original room still makes the flavours legible after the brand has gone elsewhere.

The Katong counter and what it has built around it

The original Birds of Paradise sits at 63 East Coast Road #01-05, in the Red House Katong shophouse strip, a quieter stretch that has, over the years, become one of the city's more interesting clusters for independent food businesses. The shop is small. The counter runs along one wall. The stainless steel tubs sit behind glass, each with a small handwritten card naming the flavour and noting allergens. Pale walls, wood furniture, the pink-and-green logo of the bird-of-paradise flower on the awning outside. Nothing in the room is trying to be a destination brand.

Edwin Lim opened the counter after seven years at the Defence Science & Technology Agency as a civil engineer. He quit in early 2015, spent roughly a year and a half on R&D, including Carpigiani Gelato University courses run through At-Sunrice, and opened the shop in July 2016. The flavour direction is, in a real sense, a defence engineer's botanical R&D project applied to dairy.

That R&D framing matters because it explains the shop's slow, careful expansion. The Katong counter has been joined by an outlet at Jewel Changi (a collaboration with In Good Company), a Beach Road shop, the Tanjong Pagar Craig Road counter that opened in 2022, the Holland Village boutique that opened December 2023, a Mandai cafe inside the Bird Paradise reserve that runs a slightly different format with milkshakes and savoury bites, and most recently a VivoCity outlet that opened in September 2025. Seven boutiques, all running the same botanical-led flavour list and the same thyme-infused waffle cone. None of the new locations has watered down what the original Katong commitment was doing.

That is the harder achievement than the original menu. A small ambitious gelato counter can sustain an ambitious flavour list across one or two outlets. Sustaining it across seven, with the supply-chain pressure a multi-outlet operation generates, takes real production discipline. The white chrysanthemum at VivoCity has to be the same white chrysanthemum that opened the shop in Katong almost ten years ago.

The white chrysanthemum on the thyme cone

I ordered the white chrysanthemum on a thyme-infused waffle cone because the combination is the shop's most legible argument. A floral scoop on a herbal cone is a test the shop set itself, and it's harder than it sounds. The chrysanthemum's note is delicate. Thyme's is assertive. A casual operation would have flattened the flower or buried the herb. This version has to make both legible at once.

The scoop arrived on the cone, pale white-yellow, almost translucent at the edges. The first taste was, surprisingly, herbal more than floral. In fresh tea form, white chrysanthemum is slightly cooling and slightly grassy, with a faint sweetness on the finish, and the gelato had captured all of it. The cooling note was there, the grassy edge was there, the slight sweetness on the finish was there. A few cacao nibs across the surface added a small bitter crunch.

The thyme cone added a second layer of the herb. The cone was crisp at the rim, slightly chewy at the base, with a recognisable thyme note that echoed the floral profile of the scoop. In the eating, the whole construction was more coherent than the menu's description suggested.

By the third lick the analysis stopped mattering.

I asked the staff member behind the counter for a small spoon of the current month's seasonal, a roasted sesame gelato paired this winter with an affogato format. The sesame was forward, slightly bitter at the edge, the kind of nutty depth that survives the milk-and-coffee structure of an affogato without being lost under either. That short across-the-counter exchange was the visit's small operational signal: a busy Sunday counter, a staff member who knew the seasonals by feel and could offer a credible tasting note, no theatre about it.

What the flavour list is for

The friction with Birds of Paradise is that the list will not appeal to every guest. A drinker looking for vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry will find those flavours on the menu, sitting alongside white chrysanthemum, basil, sea salt hojicha, macadamia butterfly pea, and other ingredients that may, on a cold reading, sound more like a chef's tasting card than an ice cream selection. A guest who wants only the conventional flavours can have them. A guest who wants the shop's real argument has to commit to one of the less familiar scoops.

That choice is the editorial position. The shop has decided to be a braver gelato counter than the average, and has paid for it with a narrower base of casual customers and a deeper base of regulars who have grown to trust the flavour list. Lim's expansion has carried the same commitment instead of softening it. A less serious operator would, by now, have added a long line of safer flavours and let the floral and herbal ones become a niche corner of the menu. Birds of Paradise has kept them at the centre of its identity, and the seven-outlet footprint is the working evidence that the position can scale.

The Mandai outlet is the small ideological hedge: a slightly different format with milkshakes and savoury bites, calibrated for a family audience visiting Bird Paradise next door. Even that runs the botanical scoops. The hedge is in the menu shape, not the flavour list.

Walking out of the Katong shop with the thyme cone almost finished, what struck me was how unremarkable the visit had felt. The first time a guest tries the chrysanthemum, the flavour is a small surprise. The fifth time, it's a familiar reference point. The shop has earned the familiarity by holding the standard across years and across outlets, so that the basil, the chrysanthemum, the hojicha, and the herbal cone all still taste like themselves.

A flower in a gelato is not a stunt if the flower is recognisable, and Birds of Paradise has, year after year, made the flowers recognisable. The white chrysanthemum was the proof, and the thyme cone was the rest. In a category that prefers the safer scoop, the shop has spent a decade quietly refusing to drift toward it, which is its own kind of ambition.