Akagi Gari Garikun Ice Candy Soda Popsicles: These are popular soda-flavored popsicles that taste like a combination of Sprite and Ramune, with a slight pear flavor but mostly tasting of sugar. It has an ice-blue color and is sized just like fruit popsicles in America. Overall, it's so-so - something you might like as a kid but not particularly interesting or delicious as an adult. 3.0/5.0
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Lotte Coolish Vanilla Ice Cream: I bought this ice cream out of the novelty of the packaging, a foil pouch where you squeeze soft service ice cream through a small nozzle. It makes it very easy to eat ice cream on the go and eat just as much as you want, though to be honest I ate it at home and in a single serving. The ice cream flavor is really familiar and nostalgic, like soft serve you might get at McDonald's. It's so sweet that you can feel the texture of the ice crystals as you consume it. You have to wait a few mi... (read more) 3.0/5.0
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Hobson's Tofu Ice Cream: Hobson's is an Americana-inspired ice cream shop in Roppongi, decorated with blue and white checkboard and featuring American pop music from David Bowie and the like. It's decor is verging on kitchy but also has a bit of charm. While it's clearly American-inspired, it offers Japanese flavors like green tea, tofu, and yuzu. I got the tofu ice cream, which I really wanted to like, but to be honest it was some of the worst ice cream wise, mostly because of the texture. As tofu is itself a wa... (read more) 1.0/5.0
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Happy Ice Brown Sugar Boba Ice Cream Bar: This is the famed, verging notorious, Taiwanese brown sugar boba iced tea bar, containing tapioca balls, that have been sold out everywhere. The person who was able to purchase it did not reveal its source but did say that there were multiple boxes available at this unnamed shop in the city of Los Angeles. The bar is a true work of science, with the tapioca balls retaining its iconic stretchy and chewy consistency despite being embedded in a frozen ice cream bar that tastes exactly like br... (read more) 4.5/5.0
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The Penny Ice Creamery Lemon Poppy Seed Ice Cream with Blackberry Compote: Waited in line for about 20 minutes to enter this small ice cream shop in downtown Santa Cruz. Entire clientele was student-aged. They make all their ice cream in house, and they had some interesting flavors like celery and raisin sorbet (which I sampled but found did not taste as much of celery as I would like). I got a mini scoop of their lemon poppy seed ice cream with fresh made blackberry compote, which cost a little more than $4. You can tell from the texture of the ice cream that ... (read more) 3.5/5.0
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Gomaya Kuki Sesame Ice Cream: This is a rare spot I had actually bookmarked before arriving in Japan in my search for top ice cream shops. At Gomaya Kuki, off of a side street in Shibuya, you have only the choice between black and white sesame ice cream, but each comes in three varieties. For the black sesame, you can choose between triple rich, rich, and salted, while for the white sesame, they have triple rich, rich, and chunky multigrain. I decided to try the triple rich black and chunky multigrain. On the side ar... (read more) 3.0/5.0
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