Last year I skipped the cake and celebrated my birthday by sticking candles into my current culinary obsession: Hellenika’s cultured gelato. 

For those of us who grew up in the margarine era, with milk skimmed to within an inch of its life and nonfat everything, frozen yogurt is a dirty word. For the generation that followed, frozen yogurt referred to the blank canvas at chain shops on which to paint with chocolate chips and Cap’n Crunch. 

Hellenika is what frozen yogurt should have been.

Technically, it’s not yogurt, though. It uses some of the same Greek yogurt cultures in the same fresh local milk that cofounder Alex Apostolopoulos used in his previous business, Ellenos Greek Yogurt. But his brother, Pete Apostolopoulos, the creative food scientist behind Hellenika, also adds kefir grains, and the process stops before the straining that would make it yogurt. 

It doesn’t meet the official standards for ice cream, either, mostly for lack of fat content. The brothers, along with the third founder, their sister, Connie Mikaele-Taii, settled on calling it cultured gelato, which feels doubly appropriate: a nod to the microorganisms creating flavor within it, and to the dessert’s touch of sophistication. More elegant and refined than ice cream, tangier and richer than gelato or frozen yogurt.

The flavors reflect that maturity: Hellenika sells at the U District Farmers Market and makes a caramel flavor using product from fellow vendor Yoka Miso. Other flavors look to Egyptian spices and Greek cookies for inspiration. Even the basics get a little extra oomph: vanilla malt, lemon curd, Dutch chocolate.

At Ellenos, Alex constantly puzzled over how to balance the sharpness of the yogurt. The smoother Hellenika product opened up a new world of opportunities, while staying true to his family’s history of yogurt making and indulging his more recent passion for Pike Place as a working market. “This was all about coming back to being able to produce everything in Seattle, do everything the right way,” Alex says. “We’re playing around with flavors. It’s back to being creative and a lot of fun.”

That enjoyment shows at the shop in the Market, where everything is made on-site; visitors can watch the tea as it slowly cold-drips for the Seattle Fog and taste seasonal options like Hot Cross Bun. Kids love to watch the churning as it happens, but when I get home I tend to hide the good stuff from my own children. At $10–14 a pint, this is an adult treat for those with that hallmark of adulthood: a job.

I did share with them on my birthday, of course. I smiled at how appropriate it felt to celebrate another trip around the sun with a dessert that feels designed for folks who might have a TikTok account, but also still remember their AOL screen name. When I blew out the candles, I wished for more cool new flavors and maybe even a scoop shop in my neighborhood.