May 21, 2008
Dippin Dots: The latest menace in Shanghai frozen desserts
It's easy to get excited about Dunkin' Donuts and the arrival of another Best Buy will at least offer us a more customer-friendly electronics shopping experience, but can Shanghai really handle the full frontal in-your-face Americana that is Dippin' Dots? For the uninitiated, Dippin Dots are little balls of liquid nitrogen-enhanced ice cream that look like smallpox, feel like Styrofoam, and taste like redneck. Fine, maybe they don't taste like a redneck (they taste like a cross between real ice cream and chalk), but the association is so deeply ingrained that you'll swear after one bite that 'Dueling Banjos' is playing faintly off in the distance. Available only at amusement parks, shopping malls, and NASCAR-esque sporting events, they exist somewhere in the seventh circle of the American nightmare.
Until now, that is. Apparently this infectious confection has descended on Shanghai, more specifically in the basement of Cloud Nine Shopping Center (龙之梦）in Zhongshan Park. That's right, for just 15 RMB you too can eat the so-called 'ice cream of the future' (a dystopian future no doubt). Maybe they aren't calling it Dippin Dots, but these ''Snow Balls' are unmistakably the same cryogenically frozen pellets that haunt the depths of the American psyche. Heat up the chicken wings, roll out the voting machines, and crank the Skynyrd... there goes the neighborhood.
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I guess where you're from, the salt-of-the-earth types really like dippin' dots? I never had that association. For me, they usually just came out of a really cool vending machine which used a tube and suction to pull the container of lip-freezing nodules out of their box... No rednecks to be seen...
Love Duelin' Banjos. Love NASCAR. Love Dippin Dots. (Love Rednex, too.)
Your comments are an insult to rednecks everywhere. I am sure they would boycott you if they had an Internet connection and a car that had wheels on it that could take them as far as the next town without losing a fan belt.
Really? Dippin' Dots are associated with Rednecks?* Huh.
I always associated them with second tier shopping malls (I'm looking at you Montclair Mall) and kids who had never tried Dippin' Dots before who just HAD to try them.
Then once you tried them, you never wanted them again.
Heck, even Astronaut ice cream is better.
*Maybe there just weren't enough rednecks in Los Angeles.
as soon as England gets Dippin' Dots, I'll let you know whether our rednecks are into them.
Being from the Southern USA, I can attest that these things aren't endemic to this area. They exist in every amusement park or tourist venue nationwide. I've also spotted them in Canada and Mexico, as well as Rome, Italy and Paris, France.
Shanghai is welcome to them!
It's the ice cream of the future!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!