Stockton native Dawson Phan was just 21 years old when he opened Dream Ice Cream Parlor in his hometown.
Three years after graduating from Cesar Chavez High School in 2013, Phan was set to bring something different to Stockton and “fill a void in the city” as an owner, creator, and ice cream maker.
“Growing up here, being born and raised, we were just always stuck with the same old, just Baskin Robbins, Cold Stone, no one was thinking outside the box and bringing creative desserts over here,” Phan, now 29, told The Stockton Record. “You’d always have to go to the Bay Area or Sacramento to see something cool and different.”
At the end of October 2016, he opened his ice cream shop at 5052 West Lane H . The business is less than two miles away from his former high school, where he would tell his friends about his dream of one day opening an ice cream shop.
His grand opening came just a few months later in January 2017.
“The first day we opened, it was super busy, the first year, it was just super crazy. But everyone just loved it,” Phan said. “The feedback was just really good, and it just never made me give up. I always just wanted to make sure, our customers got what they wanted and they got their fix and we’ve been kept going ever since.”