The fig and orange is the flavor people talk about. It balances tart and sweet with chunks of fig in it, and a visitor who has eaten gelato across three continents said it was the combination she had never seen before.
The other thing about it, and about every flavor in the case at Artisen Gelato on West John Street in downtown Matthews, is that it contains no dairy. The whole shop runs on coconut milk, which makes everything in it vegan and most of it gluten free, and the man who co-owns it will happily walk you through how that works.
It started with a bakery
Manolo Betancur was born in Colombia, trained as an engineer and served as an officer in the Colombian Navy before he ever baked bread professionally, according to a profile by Mountainfilm, which screened a documentary about him in 2025. He holds a second degree black belt in karate and a fourth degree in taekwondo, a degree in modern languages from King University and a certificate from a Stanford entrepreneurship program.
The bakery came first. Manolo’s Bakery on Central Avenue in east Charlotte, which took over an older Latin bakery called Las Delicias, became one of the best known Latino businesses in the city, and in 2021 the International Baking Industry Exposition named Betancur its World Bread Hero for the United States. Axios covered the gelato shop as a spinoff: a Matthews storefront co-owned by the bakery’s founder, with the gelato also sold at the Central Avenue bakery.
Betancur has been an entrepreneur for 28 years, and his story of becoming a United States citizen after what Mountainfilm describes as a landmark ruling has been covered by outlets from PBS North Carolina to the Washington Post and Reuters.
The man behind the counter
Betancur runs the bakery, the gelato shop, a coffee house called Higher Grounds and a nonprofit called By Immigrant Hands, and the businesses together support more than two dozen local nonprofits, according to the Mountainfilm profile. He wrote a book called Speaking from My Heart and gave a Creative Mornings talk titled How to Discover the Hero in You.
The part that shows up in the gelato shop is the tour. Visitors describe Betancur walking them through how a dairy free, gluten free gelato gets as rich as it does, and the answer is the coconut milk and the quality of what goes into it. One visitor who came in skeptical wrote that she had to know how the products could taste that good without dairy, and left having been shown.
What you actually order
The flavors rotate, and new ones keep appearing. Coffee mocha chip and s’mores are the ones Axios named, and customers name blueberry cheesecake, mango passion fruit cheesecake, green apple caramel, peach cobbler, cookie dough, strawberry and mint chocolate chip, in waffle bowls or cones. Sorbet runs alongside the gelato. Coffee and tea are made with the same attention, and there are baked goods for anyone who came from the bakery’s side of the family.
The shop is described as allergy friendly instead of simply vegan, which is the distinction that matters to a parent of a child with a dairy allergy. It is one of the few places in the region where the whole family can order from the same counter without a separate menu.
The bakery that funds all of this is on Central Avenue in east Charlotte, and it is where the gelato is also sold. Betancur’s path to citizenship was covered nationally, and the documentary about him, The Changebaker, won the Moving Mountains Award at Mountainfilm in 2025. His nonprofit, By Immigrant Hands, and the businesses around it have supported more than 26 local nonprofits, according to the festival’s profile.
The shop’s space in Matthews is larger than a gelato counter needs, which one visitor noted made it easy to spread out, and it sits a short walk from the town’s farmers market and the historic downtown covered in our Matthews guide. Staff let customers sample before choosing, and reviewers describe them as patient with a child working through the case one spoon at a time. Service slows when the room fills on a warm Saturday, which is the only recurring complaint.
Why it matters
Matthews has a main street with a handful of independent businesses on it, and the gelato shop is the one that surprises people, partly because a dairy free gelato shop in a small Southern town is an unlikely thing, and partly because of who is behind it.
Betancur’s businesses have become a reference point in Charlotte for what an immigrant entrepreneur can build, and the shop in Matthews is the smallest and sweetest of them. It exists because a baker with an engineering degree decided that people who cannot eat dairy deserved gelato as good as everyone else’s, and then made it.