Rhea’s Ice Cream co-owner Lindsey Belk said when the shop’s founder, Rhea Ortamond, showed him how to make the nearly two dozen flavors of ice cream the shop sells, it was a “spooky” experience.

“I was the very first person she ever showed how to make them,” Belk said. “It felt like she was letting me hold her child.”

Belk came into ownership of Rhea’s Ice Cream, located at 318 N. LBJ Drive, San Marcos, in June after Ortamond nearly had to close the shop because of a cross-country move. Instead, Belk and fellow downtown restaurateur Kyle Mylius, who also owns Root Cellar Café, stepped in to keep the business alive.

Ortamond developed the recipes with her mother and grandmother. In 2009, as a student at Texas State University, she took second place at the Austin Ice Cream Festival, losing out on the top honor to Bob Blumer, a television host on Food Network Canada. One year later she opened Rhea’s Ice Cream.

Since taking over the shop, Belk has capitalized on his close relationship with Root Cellar. The cafe’s bakery now supplies Rhea’s with fresh-baked brownies and cookies each day. These can be added to the shop’s ice cream creations for $2 and $3, respectively.

In addition to ice cream, the shop also sells milkshakes, Busy Bee Mate—a tea made from yerba mate plants—and a variety of sodas.

The most popular ice cream flavor, avocado coconut, takes many by surprise, Belk said. When guests come in unsure of what to order, he said he likes to start them there. It is one of the many nontraditional flavors the shop offers. In late August, Belk was taste-testing a garlic ice cream, which even he admitted was risky. Other flavors at the shop include chocolate milkshake and s’mores.

“When people come in for the first time and they’re not sure what to get, I say, ‘This is my favorite,’ and I hand them avocado coconut,” he said. “Those two flavors are very unique, and I think that makes people open their eyes and be willing to expand their horizons. They say, ‘Oh, that’s better than I thought it would be.’”

Belk said he hopes to one day expand Rhea’s to include four locations along the I-35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio. For now he is content building on the standard of quality Ortamond set when she first opened the shop, he said.

Managing the shop gives him more fulfillment than his previous job as an engineer, he said.

“I liked [being an engineer], but it didn’t make me real happy,” he said. “I didn’t come home with this feeling like I get from this kind of thing. I’ve always had a big passion for people, and in engineering there is not a lot of that.”