Shri Satya Vijay Patel Ice Cream: Rajkot’s first ice cream shop started as a tea stall

Shri Satya Vijay Patel Ice Cream parlour on Sir Lakhajiraj Road in Rajkot. (Express photo by Chirag Chotaliya)

Ravi Patel, a bearded man sitting at the cash counter, welcomes Khunt with a genial smile. Khunt, who runs a mobile phone retailing show-room in the Ranchhodnagar area of the city, takes a seat near the wall decorated with a collage of 21 framed prints of Raja Ravi Varma paintings to savour his cup of fig-flavoured ice cream.

Though it’s May, the month during which the majority of around 1.5 million dwellers of Rajkot prefer to remain indoors in the afternoon, a steady stream of customers keeps the Satya Vijay Ice Cream shop busy. But most of them come for carry-home cups. Khunt, who was also into film distribution early in his life, is an exception. He has been frequenting SSVPIC for almost half a century, sometimes to beat the summer heat and at others to pamper his taste buds. Today, while out on some bank-related chore in the vicinity, he couldn’t keep himself from Satya Vijay Ice Cream—as the shop is known.

As there are not many customers inside the parlour, Ravi, 41, also joins Khunt at the marbled-top table with Irani chairs arranged around it. The two talk about the days at the parlour when a jukebox would play Bollywood songs and a weighing scale that would show your weight by inserting a 10-paisa coin were there. Ravi tells him both still work but have been stashed away in the store room. A valve radio, imported from England and mounted on the wall behind the cash counter, adds to the nostalgia.

Mohammed Kadri (extreme left) purchases ice cream from Satya Vijay Patel Ice Cream parlour on Sir Lakhajiraj Road in Rajkot. (Express photo by Chirag Chotaliya)

“This is the first radio set of Rajkot, having licence No.1 (in the old days, one had to obtain a licence for keeping a radio) while the one brought by the Rajkot state was the second one,” says Khunt as Ravi adds how the Rajkot state had ordered it on behalf of his great grand uncle Mavjibhai.

SSVPIC has many such firsts. Established by Mavji Jeram Patel in 1913, it was the first ice cream parlour in Rajkot city, the capital of the erstwhile princely state of Rajkot established in 1617. Originally from the Matirala village in the Amreli district, Mavji migrated to Rajkot in 1909. He got a job in the railways as a supervisor of coal. Recognising his competence and dedication, he was awarded a gold medal by Lakhajiraj Jadeja, the then thakor (the title rulers of Rajkot used to assume) of the Rajkot state.

Ravi says that Mavji encashed the medal and started a tea stall in 1910-11 and also added sharbats to the menu. “However, Lakhajiraj took Mavji on a tour of London, showed him a hand-operated churner for making ice cream and gave him money to import one such churner from London in 1913,” says Ravi, the fourth-generation joint heir of the Patel family who today runs SSVPIC in partnership with his younger brother Sagar, says.

Ravi’s grandfather Bachubhai had taken over SSVPIC from Mavji. In turn, Bachubhai handed over the business to his son Bhudar and Bhudar eventually passed it on to Ravi and Sagar.

Once he had the churner, Mavji launched his firm, Satya Vijay Patel Soda Factory, and started selling carbonated soft drinks, sharbats, and ice creams from the parlour on Sir Lakhaji Road. Satya Vijay started out by offering customers ice creams in four flavours—rose, vanilla, kaju-draksh (cashew nuts and grapes), and kesar-badam (saffron and almond). The ice cream clicked not with only residents of Rajkot but also with rural people for whom the city was a marketplace. So much so that in 1978, SSVPIC took soft drinks and sharbats off its menu. Mavji also became the Rajkot dealer for the Bush and Viola companies in the UK.

Portrait of Mavji Jeram Patel inside Shri Satya Vijay Patel Ice Cream parlour on Sir Lakhajiraj Road in Rajkot. (Express photo by Chirag Chotaliya)

For almost nine decades, SSVPIC is still synonymous with ice creams in Rajkot and the centrepiece of the ice cream culture of the city, drawing in customers like Bollywood actors Amitabh Bachchan and Govinda and politicians like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L K Advani, Narendra Modi, late Gujarat finance minister Manoharsinh Jadeja etc. Former Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani, who is a resident of Rajkot, also patronises this parlour.

It’s just the parlour decor which has changed with time. The woodwork in the parlour has given way to an aluminium façade and glass doors. However, the interior remains the same with the large wall-to-wall Belgium glass, Irani furniture, Raja Ravi Varma painting prints, the radio, a Seikosha wall clock etc. Three years ago, Ravi installed air conditioners in the shop.

“We are into the service industry and one has to change for remaining relevant to the changing times and appealing to newer generations,” says Ravi. “My great-granduncle (Mavji) used to offer ice cream in four flavours. Today, we are offering it in 300 flavours besides milkshakes and thick shakes. We are taking care of the tastes of old generations while offering new products to new generations. We are making home deliveries and our products are available on Zomato and Swiggy also.”

Today, Amul and Vadilal are big ice cream brands in Gujarat. SSVPIC also has city competitors like Shiv Shakti Ice Cream and Sheetal of Amreli. Not only this, other local ice parlours like Niti Vijay, Shakti Vijay, Vishram etc which Mavji had helped his friends establish, are also there.

“But we have maintained our customer base and our business is growing. This is the reason our family today runs eight branches of SSVPIC in the city,” Ravi, who, in partnership with Sagar, runs three out of the eight SVVPIC branches, says.

He is the fourth generation owner of the Patel family and today runs SSVPIC in partnership with his younger brother Sagar. “We have been able to do this by our insistence on serving only the highest quality ice cream. We don’t use thickeners, stabilisers or milk creams but only pure milk as an ingredient and make ice cream through churners only whereas others make their ice cream by freezing it in freezers,” he adds.

For almost nine decades, SSVPIC is still synonymous with ice creams in Rajkot and the centrepiece of the ice cream culture of the city. (Express photo by Chirag Chotaliya)

One of the SSVPIC branches is on Race Course Ring Road, the city’s main zone of ice cream parlours, and Special Badam and Sitafal are among the most popular varieties of this ice cream parlour chain. While Mavji started with one churner of five litres, Ravi has more than a dozen mechanised churners to prepare ice cream. Ravi claims the proof of the purity of ice creams sold by SSVPIC is that if allowed to melt, it should again become milk, and not a thick paste or cream.

“As we don’t use any stabilisers or thickeners, the shelf-life of our ice cream is very short. Therefore, we have not opened our parlours in any other cities. But we are happy that we have eight branches, the highest for any local ice cream brand in Rajkot,” says Ravi.

Like Khunt, who has been eating ice cream at SSVPIC since a cup of it was priced at 35 paise, this century-old parlour has many loyal customers, including the royal family of Rajkot. “We send ice cream to the palace every day. The family bonds may not be that strong now but the relationship which began more than a century ago endures in the form of a strong customer-supplier relationship,” says Ravi.

And so has the loyalty of many other customers even as a 90-gram cup today costs Rs 48. “When I was a child, my father used to bring me here for a cup of ice cream. For me, the taste and quality here are the best,” says Bhavin Fichadiya, 31, a jeweller who has come to purchase dry-fruit ice cream for his three-year-old daughter Jhanvi.

Mohammed Kadri, 17, whose father has a real estate business, too, has a weakness for SSVPIC since his uncle Maqsood introduced him to ice creams. “I like the creaminess and smoothness of Satya Vijay ice creams,” he says, oblivious to the history of the shop.

Like Fichadiya and Kadri, enough Rajkotians throng the parlour in the evenings, especially on weekends, to taste the ice creams offered by SSVPIC to keep it going strong 110 years after it was set up.