Dallas has never had a shortage of dessert, just a shortage of dessert after ten o’clock. That gap is exactly what Dessert Lab was built to fill, and the little local operation has quietly grown to three shops without much fanfare, which is more than can be said for most of the trend-chasing sweet spots that come and go around here.
The story starts with Amaan and Shima Patel, a young couple who walked away from careers in health consulting and chemical engineering to sell sweets. Their reasoning was refreshingly simple: they wanted dessert late at night and could never find it. So, when they opened their first Dessert Lab in Richardson in 2022, they kept the lights on past midnight. A second shop followed at Frankford and the Tollway in far North Dallas, and a third opened in Allen last year on State Highway 121. The motto over the whole enterprise: donut say no to ice cream.
They mean it literally. The house signature is the Dowich, a doughnut split and stuffed with ice cream, joined by its siblings the Waffwich and the Cookiewich. From there the menu sprawls in the best way: churro bowls loaded with ice cream and a choice of Nutella, caramel, or chocolate, Belgian waffle plates, and a long run of crepes in combinations like strawberry Nutella, Biscoff, Ferrero Rocher, and Kit Kat.
The milkshake list splits into classics like the Oreo Blizzard and Fruity Pebble Shake and a premium tier where things get interesting, including a churro shake, a s’mores shake, and a Rooh Afza shake built on the rose syrup familiar to anyone raised on South Asian sweets. That last one is the tell that this is a personal operation, not a franchise kit.
Then there is the full Dubai Chocolate Series, the Patels’ commitment to the pistachio-chocolate wave: a Dubai Chocolate Crack Shake, Dubai pistachio crepes and waffle plates, Dubai churros, Dubai cheesecake, and fruit cups draping strawberries and bananas in the stuff. Most shops added one Dubai item and called it a day. Dessert Lab built a wing…