Big Chill Ice Cream & Italian Ice

During the monthly food truck gathering I was excited to see that Big Chill offered a mobile version of the gelati that’s available at Rita’s Italian Ice: alternating layers of Italian ice and ice cream so you get a contrast in textures and flavors. Unfortunately, the super sweet generic vanilla soft serve completely stomped over the mild flavor of the blue raspberry Italian ice, creating something that was less of an interesting contrast in flavors and textures, and more of a way of highlighting the amount of stabilizers used to create the mouthfeel in that soft serve. And also giving me an ice cream headache. Even in the sweltering June heat, this was not a refreshing treat.
The website sets up this business as more of a catering or special event-​type of truck, emphasizing the «digital-​quality» music and the variety of sporting events at which they could be parked. Those events might be a little bit more their speed — even for something as simple as soft serve and Italian ice it took up to 5 minutes to complete a customer’s transaction. Not very long in the grand scheme of the mess Food Trucks at the Fountain can become after a couple of hours, but with the soft serve machine on one side of the truck and the cooler with the ice on the other side of the truck, there’s a lot of back-​and-​forth that has to happen if someone orders an item that utilizes both of those things.