Falooda Found
When the definitive ranking of the world’s best ice cream is finally tallied, the case for the South Asian variety will be especially strong — at least in part because of the milkshake-like treat falooda. I first heard about the drink from my girlfriend, who had discovered it in Chicago as a teenager when she’d asked a waiter in a Pakistani fast food joint what someone else was drinking. When she tried it, the shake was mysterious and delicious: a heavy, intensely sweet concoction of rose-flavored ice cream, milk, rose syrup, vermicelli, and basil seeds.
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Years later, on our first trip together to Chicago, my girlfriend took me to find falooda in the South Asian area near the intersection of Western and Devon. But the Pakistani fast food shop was gone, or had relocated. And since she had not ordered it by name, and hadn’t had the drink in years, we weren’t even sure what the shake was called: “faludi”? “falooja”? We walked up and down Western in vain that day. Many waiters gave us uncomprehending looks when we asked if they served the drink. With that disappointment, tracking down falooda became a bit of an obsession for us. We thought we’d found it a month later at Bombay Ice Cream, an Indian ice cream shop on Valencia Street in San Francisco. But the |
At Bombay Ice Cream, I liked kesar pista even better than rose. It’s made with saffron and pistachio, and my first taste of it produced an unexpected sensation that my brain didn’t quite know how to process. The texture was clearly that of ice cream, but it carried a flavor that I strongly associate with yellow rice. Other ice creams have a tendency to taste like the flavor they’re meant to be and cream, but in kesar pista the nuts and spice overwhelm any hint of dairy. Eating it is very unusual.
For my birthday that year, my girlfriend gave me a gift certificate for custom-made ice cream. After months of deliberation, I finally came up with a flavor I knew I wouldn’t find in New York: ‘broken coconuts,’ a saffron-almond base with bits of chewy young coconut and crushed ice cream cone mixed in. While really good, it didn’t match the kesar pista we’d had in San Francisco. Too busy, perhaps, or maybe the milk fat content was too high to accentuate the flavors properly. For the time being, with four quarts in our freezer, it was good enough.
Months later, right around the time we’d almost finished the last quart of broken coconuts, I came across an online reference to Bombay Café Kwality Ice Cream, a parlor in the South Asian section of Jersey City, New Jersey. Several flavors caught my eye, including saffron and something called 'kulfi falooda.' Very promising.
The next chance we got, on a sunny late-April day, my girlfriend and I took the PATH train from Manhattan to Journal Square. The neighborhood is filled with South Asian restaurants, groceries, fabric shops, and other stores — in many ways, it feels like the kind of small-town shopping districts that were common, and successful, until malls and suburban sprawl took over. We walked up and down bustling Newark Avenue and stopped in at several shops. We also ate South Indian-style masala dosas at Dosa Hut, a much-lauded neighborhood institution.
Most fascinating, though, was Singh’s Department Store — an Indian-owned shop crammed with layers and layers of religious paraphernalia. It was once a typical small-town five-and-dime, and beneath and behind all of the Indian items for sale are the dusty but perfectly preserved accoutrements of a late 1970s or early ‘80s variety store: cheap board games and plastic toys, pop music 45s, and walls fully covered in faded t-shirt iron-ons. Singh’s seemed a good metaphor for the neighborhood, with the area’s newer residents building their own downtown right on the remnants of an older one.
Though it doesn’t look the part, it wouldn’t be too hard to imagine that Bombay Café was built on the site of an old ice cream parlor. It is one of three suburban New York-area parlors for Kwality Ice Cream, a Jersey-based South Asian-style brand. When we visited, the ice cream itself didn’t disappoint. We sampled multiple flavors — kesar pista may have been even better than the one we had in San Francisco. And — at last! — the menu offered falooda.
My girlfriend ordered a traditional one with rose-petal ice cream, but I decided to combine my twin ice cream obsessions and asked for a falooda made with kesar pista. We compared the two on the walk back to the PATH station. Sometimes it might be best to keep your obsessions distinct from one another: my falooda was good, but hers was excellent. The rose syrup muted the saffron flavor of my shake; in hers, the syrup perfectly complemented the rose-petal ice cream.
Last weekend, more than a year after that visit, I returned to Journal Square. My friend Oliver has been planning a trip to India for a couple of years, but he’s had to delay it several times. A visit to Jersey City — and particularly to Singh’s Department Store — seemed like a good way to tide him over. We first stopped at Sri Ganesh’s Dosa House for lunch, trying masala dosas, vegetable biryani, tea, and an especially good mango lassi. Then, sated, we slowly made our way up and down Newark Avenue, checking out groceries and other shops that seemed interesting. Disappointingly, Singh’s itself was closed for the day, but we took an extended peek through the front door, and talked about returning another day.
Finally, on the walk back to the train station, we stopped at Bombay Café and sampled several flavors. Kesar pista was as superlative as I remembered, and ones I hadn’t tried before, like thandai (mixed nuts) and chikoo (sapodilla) were also really good. Though we were still pretty full from Dosa House, Oliver ordered a cup of kesar pista and chikoo. Recalling the lesson I’d learned on my first visit, I resisted ordering saffron and asked for a traditional falooda with rose-petal ice cream. When the counter woman handed the drink to me, I sipped it through a straw, marveling at its complementary textures — light, slippery basil seeds and long, chewy noodles balanced the viscous rose syrup and smooth, dense ice cream. It was a fantastic, top-ranking classic.