A Cry For Help

When it comes to food, NYC seems to have everything you could imagine. But we've been here for nearly three months and have identified two glaring exceptions. Exception #1: Malts. We have made every attempt to locate a good malt in this city, but have failed miserably. There's not a single Dairy Queen here, and certainly not a Dari King. Go to Shake Shack, right? We have tried that and, in our opinion, the malts were overpriced and contained little to no malt powder. We stopped by a TCBY this weekend and tried to order a malt. Even though malts were listed on their menu, they informed us they didn't have malts! We stopped by a Haagan-Dazs in our neighborhood and asked if they had malts - nope! The other two ice cream shops in our neighborhood were equally maltless. Why is this happening? A lot of places carry shakes and blended drinks. Is it that difficult to stock malt powder? If you're going through the effort of blending together ice cream and a flavor, what's the harm in adding a spoonful of malt powder? Is there some East coast malt powder shortage that we're not aware of?! What is going on?!?!?

After some additional research, Bryan found "Milk & Cookies Bakery" which had malts on the menu. In hopes of striking gold, we made the trek tonight. It was a cute shop on a quiet West Village street.





After being assured that they had caramel, Bryan ordered a caramel malt. Not wanting to place all our bets on the malts, Alyssa ordered the Grasshopper, an ice cream sandwich (mint gelato between two double chocolate cookies).



Looks good, doesn't it? The ice cream sandwich was good. But as you guessed, the malt was not. As the guy carried it over to the cash register, it was sloshing around in the cup. A terrible sign. One sip and the answer was clear: we were still maltless. The malt - if you can even call it that - was more like caramel milk. It was pretty cold, so we assumed there was probably some ice cream in it, but the milk-to-ice cream ratio was at best 6:1.

Exception #2: Cheese curds. We've scoured cyberspace to track down a place with cheese curds in Manhattan. It appears there are a few places in Brooklyn that offer these precious delicacies, but nowhere in Manhattan.

And so we reach our cry for help: If you know of a place in Manhattan that serves cheese curds or legitimate malts - with ice cream, chocolate/caramel, NO (or very little) MILK added, and malt powder - we would be extremely grateful for your recommendation.