I walked a few miles around Uptown and Southend in the sun to prepare myself for an ice cream experience. Having scoured the options from Fourth Ward to Atherton Mill I selected this joint ahead of time based on the online menu. The online menu said the selection in the stores may vary so I had picked out several flavours that appealed to me, just so I had some backups as needed - hope for the best, prepare for the worst. I didn't want chocolate anything so obviously that limits your options. The Jeni's was nearby but I just went to the one in South Austin since I was there for bidness right before I came to CLT, so a local chain was far preferable to a national chain.
When I walked in there was nobody in the ice cream portion of the store besides the cashier. I quickly noticed the paper thin curtain covering the wall to the adjacent Tex-Mex joint, so you get the full auditory melange of clinking silverware, drunk talking from the diners that had three many margaritas, and other miscellaneous restaurant noise like breaking glass from a dropped water chalice. That is just to say, you are essentially in a loud Tex-Mex restaurant but behind the "adult video section" type curtain if you are old enough to have ever been in that section of the video store before we all started borrowing Netflix logins from the weird horse girl that didn't mind sharing the one thing all men are thinking about when they hang with her: more episodes of Fauda.
They had not a single flavour on my list of acceptables. D'oh! I regretted putting all of my eggs in this store's basket since I was not going to Jeni's again so soon and the gelato place back up the block towards Atherton was not open for the day yet, so I was a captive audience here if I wanted anything closely approximating ice creams.
I ordered the krazy kake flavour. It was vanilla cake pieces, vanilla ice cream, and rainbow sprinkles. The consistency was anything but creamy, which was my first problem with the actual ice cream, having moved beyond the atmospheric gripes of the loud Tex-Mex through the curtain. As I spooned it out, chunks of the ice cream fell apart. Ice cream is not supposed to be chunks only lightly fused together like a mad science experiment where an ice cream arm (or perhaps a Québécois tooth of the ice cream monstrosity) falls off randomly from the cup in a solid chunk. The taste was also strikingly bland. Vanilla is exceptional when it tastes like actual vanilla, there is a reason why it was an aristocratic spice for so long in human history that only kings and those sufficiently obsequious (obviously doing an Italian hand gesture here) to them got to taste the magnificence of vanilla. Meanwhile this ice cream right here was closer in taste to sitting on someone's lap whilst they thought of Ohio store brand vanilla, and that is all the flavour you were rationed for the month.
I would say no on the ambiance and a hard no on the krazy kake flavour, so my personal experience was a one star so much that I moved on to the Golden Cow rather than as originally planned, come back here a second time to try another flavour from the online menu (which they obviously did not have in the store). After abandoning it for the taste and texture issues, I threw out more than half of my ice cream while I brainstormed how many times I could use 'Ohio' to devastating effect in a yelp review. I think this one sets a new record.
But, your mileage may vary with one of the chocolate based options or if you like the blandest, oddly chunkiest, not-creamy ice cream possible in the guise of that krazy kake. If this was Mean Girls, that krazy kake would have a whole chapter in the burn book about her, not just a page.
Just don't assume the online menu will have most (or all) flavours actually in the store - they tell you on the webpage the selection may vary, but the selection in-store was appreciably small compared to the breadth of the online menu.
Imagine going to the Sephora at Atherton and instead of everything in-stock from Glow Recipe to Summer Fridays they only had Ohio store brand soap and told you that the selection varies from store to store - it is just not going to be as divine of an experience if your options are limited to simply what's left, rather than having your own choice among what originally looked to be many fine options whilst you were still browsing mein internets for flavour rankings. read more