It ain’t easy to find a late-night dessert spot these days, but here’s a new hipster cafe to check out in Tanjong Pagar. Called Roji Monster Ice Cream, it opens till 11pm on weekdays and 12am on weekends. It specialises in ice cream, waffle and shaved ice desserts.

The brand (its name means ‘dewy ground’ in Japanese) actually hails from Taiwan, though it has overseas outlets in Korea, Australia, China, US, Canada and Malaysia. Singapore is its latest stop. It soft-opened on Feb 26 this year, and is located at Tanjong Pagar Rd (right across the site of the recent tragic Tanjong Pagar car crash and defunct cafe Five Oars Coffee Roasters).

The cafe sports clean, Japanese-style minimalist decor, and looks like an inviting oasis on a sweltering day. It has an adorable mascot, an anthropomorphic creature that resembles a tapioca pearl (or the soot sprites from Spirited Away).

There are about 32 seats in the cafe (before taking into account safe distancing). At the back of the shop are OOTD spots with cute life-sized mascots.

The desserts here are all cold and refreshing, like Soft Serve Ice Cream ($6.90), which comes in three flavours - milk, matcha and a mix of both. You can opt to add toppings (additional $1 each) such as chendol, longan honey, brown sugar tapioca pearls and cornflakes.

There’s also a Monster Waffle ($10.90; promotional price $6.90), which comes with soft serve, matcha cream, chocolate syrup and house-made waffle in the shape of a ‘monster’.

Roji specialises in shaved ice cream, which is a hybrid between the popular Taiwanese shaved ice dessert and ice cream. The sheets of shaved ice are creamier, and melts in your mouth like ice cream.

The shaved ice is served as a customisable bowl called Monster Ice Cream, where you can choose an ice cream flavour plus your choice of two toppings from 23 types.

There are four flavours of monster ice cream available: Milk, Uji matcha, Belgian chocolate and Black Sesame. Toppings include Rice Dumpling with Red Bean, Roasted Organic Chestnuts, Attap Seed, Mini Dorayaki, Salted Cherry Jelly, Avocado Purée and Tamago Boro (the chalky egg-flavoured, pellet-shaped biscuits from our childhood).

Customers place their customised orders by stamping on tiny cards provided at the entrance and handing ’em over at the cashier. Very cute, though a bit leceh.

Our ice cream bowl looks too pretty to eat - the shaggy black sesame shaved ice monster stares at us with two googly icing sugar eyes.

We mercilessly dig into it. There’s a pronounced black sesame flavour, but the ice cream-shaved ice hybrid is a tad unsatisfying. It’s too light to be enjoyed as the richer ice cream (go for the cafe’s milk soft serve; it fares better), and too creamy for a perk-me-up icy dessert.

Our Salted Cherry Jelly resembles the once-viral raindrop cake, but yields the texture of mushy agar agar. We like the flirty hint of salted sakura flower, though (turns out, the ‘salted cherry’ in its moniker refers to cherry blossoms).

The freshly-made waffle fares better. It’s an eggy, ultra-crispy disc that goes well with dainty dabs of matcha cream, smooth, milky soft serve and standard issue chocolate syrup.

Address: 52 Tg Pagar Rd, S088473.