Besides the promise of sweet desserts making your mouth water, the bakery itself looks very much like a scene out of a Christmas card, decked out in festive decorations to usher in the season.
In the middle is the bakery’s treasure, a mouthwatering display of gelatos of assorted colours and flavours, making you wish you could sample each and every one of them right away.
If these aren’t tempting enough, the display of elegant eclairs, delicate macaroons and dainty cakes will leave you feeling slightly dizzy.
And the man behind this mayhem is Marcus Tan, 32, co-founder of Gelattido Patisserie.
Speaking to FMT, he said he took almost two years experimenting with the various gelato flavours and pastries before feeling confident enough to open his own bakery in this chic part of Seremban 2.
A graduate from Adelaide’s Le Cordon Bleu, Marcus worked in several bakeries in Australia before heading home to be closer to family. In 2018, he opened his bakery.
He said the bakery was previously called Senawang ‘Marcus Bakery & Patisserie Café’. However, the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 wreaked havoc on his business, and he was forced to shut it down.
Luckily, all was not lost. By the end of that same year, he was
introduced to a friend who had an orchard. Having a lightbulb moment, he pitched the idea of creating fruit-based desserts, specifically durian, cempedak and nangka.
“I like the idea of gelato. And it took me a year or so to experiment with flavours. Last year during Chinese New Year, I made only three gelato flavours – coconut, cempedak and soursop.”
He treated it as a “trial period”, asking friends and family members for feedback. The gelato was sold online at the time since he had no physical shop. When sales were off the charts, he was ready to open his bakery.
Collaborating with a family friend Artist Leong, the bakery soon took shape. Leong handles the sales and marketing side of the business, while Tan is parked in the kitchen happily experimenting with his desserts.
Leong, who once worked as a fine arts lecturer, also began creating artworks of the bakery’s desserts, displaying these on the wall as a cheeky way to lure customers to try their many offerings.
Almost a year on, the bakery is doing a brisk business, mostly with the younger crowd on the hunt for the new flavours that are introduced every month.
Over here, the flavours are a combination of wild-and-weird with the more traditional – peanut butter and jam, lime curd, white chocolate and Chocolate Temptation.
“When we had a shortage of workers, I used to buy durian puree and pistachio paste from the stores for the gelato. But thankfully, with more workers, I’ve managed to whip up my own durian and pistachio paste,” he said.
The desserts are just as fabulous as the gelatos. FMT was treated to the bakery’s signature coffee eclair, homemade plain croissant, almond croissant and two scoops of their signature dark chocolate-and-vanilla gelato.
The coffee eclairs filled with coffee cream were heavenly. Meanwhile, the croissants were light as air and buttery, with its crispy caramel-coloured layers melting in your mouth at first bite.
The dark chocolate-and-vanilla gelato was a great combination, with the sweeter vanilla complementing the slightly bitter dark chocolate to perfection.
If you want a creamier gelato, ask for the lotus biscoff or the mango-infused Mangozza. In fact, there’s so many fascinating flavours to choose from, you might very well have to come back for more.
Apart from desserts, you can also sit down to a hot or cold cappuccino or latte, or chilled tangy lemonade.
Follow Gelattido Patisserie on Facebook and Instagram.
Gelattido Patisserie
166G, Jalan S2 B3
Seremban 2
70300 Seremban
Negeri Sembilan
Business hours:
11.00am – 11.00pm daily
Contact: 011-6538 6166