Glacé

Christy Tania earned her pastry-chef stripes at some of Melbourne’s best restaurants, including Vue de Monde and Jacques Reymond. She worked at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and Guy Savoy in Singapore before returning to Melbourne as head chef at Om Nom, a dessert-only fine diner at the Adelphi Hotel. But most people know her from MasterChef, where her challenges reliably struck fear into competitors.

Glacé, her first venue, opened in August 2017. At the frozen dessert store everything lives in a “yellow submarine” – an ode to her Dad, a big Beatles fan. Behind its neon yellow facade is an equally yellow interior, which replicates the inside of a submarine, playfully fitted out with pressure gauges, pipes and airlock doorhandles.

Tania’s French culinary education – she studied at the Ducasse Institute Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Patisserie outside Lyon – is clear in the Glacé menu, where ice-cream filled eclairs sit alongside ice-cream filled macarons.

But there are also a number of items that are pure Tania, such as charcoal cones, frozen s’mores on sticks, gelato cakes and ice-cream push pops. Her singular ice-cream flavours include Plaisir Sucre – milk chocolate and hazelnut ice-cream with caramelised, roasted hazelnuts – and the Ispahan, a lychee, rosewater and raspberry sorbet. There are 20 permanent ice-cream flavours available, alongside two rotating flavours.