There have been so many new ice cream shops that popped up this summer and one of my favorites is Matcha Love. Located inside Mitsuwa, the soft serve ice cream is rich and luxurious and comes in hard-to-find Asian flavors of matcha, black sesame and hoji-cha. You can also get a variety of shakes and lattes.

Matcha and Hoji-cha

On one recent visit, I chose matcha and hoji-cha. The hoji-cha is a roasted tea. I found the sprinkling of tea powder a tad too bitter. A lot of my friends really love this flavor so maybe this was just an off day. I’ll have to try again at some other point. I really love the matcha flavor though and this is the only place I’ve ever seen matcha soft serve ice cream served.

Triple Ice Waffle Bowl

The triple ice waffle bowl gives you mini servings of matcha, black sesame and vanilla. Unfortunately, they do not allow you to substitute out the vanilla for hoji-cha, which is quite disappointing because while I like vanilla, I would rather try a more unique flavor. Interestingly, vanilla is not offered on its own–only in the combination waffle bowl.

The vanilla is actually vanilla bean and you can see specks of vanilla bean throughout. However, the ice cream was extremely grainy. I’m not quite where they went wrong since they do such a superb job with the other flavors, but we really didn’t like this one. Of the three, my favorite remained the matcha. I wish they would turn the sweetness of the black sesame down a notch.

Overall, we like stopping in here for ice cream. It’s the only place in San Diego that offers such unique Japanese soft serve flavors and they don’t skimp on the ingredients. The ice cream is very rich, unlike some soft serve places which use a cheaper cream base that causes the soft serves to be watery and runny. They also use high quality matcha powder for the matcha flavored ice cream.

You can read about my first visit here.

Matcha Love
(inside Mitsuwa Marketplace)
4240 Kearny Mesa Rd.
San Diego, CA 92111