Life is sweet…

I got a notification from wordpress yesterday, wishing me a Happy Anniversary! Oh? The day went past without my noticing it, 7th March (it was the 7th in the US yesterday) which means that I’ve been doing this for 8 years now, beginning in 2008 and still going strong, I guess – coming up to 3,000 posts and almost 2 million views, with over 360,000 visitors and a current total of over 80,000 comments. Not bad, eh, this old guy? Wink! Wink!

Well, coincidentally, we dropped by this place…

…in town so perhaps I can consider that to be a mini-celebration of sorts. This is not exactly new and by now, many would have dropped by here already – it had its soft opening quite sometime ago before Chinese New Year.

All this while, I had never had the chance to go and check it though but on Monday, I had to drive all the way to get my girl from her school as she is having something on here in Sibu – yesterday and today. She was supposed to follow a colleague back, one who commutes daily as his family is in Sibu but he took the day off because the kid was down with fever. When we came back to town, I asked my girl if she would like some gelato and she did!

So there we were…

…my first time here. This is actually an extension of or a spin-off from this place that I do like and frequent quite a lot. Obviously, they have been doing so well that they have decided to set up a new place specialising in macarons…

…mille crepes…

…cakes and coffee…

…and of course, gelato…

My girl did stop by a couple of weeks ago and she bought three scoops home – the salted caramel, cream cheese and pistachio and yes, we did enjoy all of them very much, a lot more than the ones we had here sometime ago.

This time around, I chose the Volcano Gelato (RM19.80)…

…3 scoops and I picked the cream cheese, banana and salted caramel.

My girl went and poured the chocolate in long thin lines on the gelato…

…and it hardened instantly…

…upon contact with the cold. Hmmmmm…interesting!

For one thing, the way it was served, one would need to eat the two scoops on top first before one will be able to get to the scoop at the bottom and for another, I do think they would need to look into their quality control – we loved the salted caramel before but this time around, we found it a tad too salty and there was only a slight hint of the caramel taste. The cream cheese was nice and I loved the banana!

My girl has the double scoop Brussel waffle (RM17.80)…

…and she opted for her favourites – the cream cheese and the salted caramel but of course, the latter was a disappointment that day…and we did not like the waffle either. I did hear word going round that the waffles here were not nice and a friend mentioned on Facebook that theirs are not the regular ones that we know and love. He said that theirs are “yeasted waffles”, whatever those are and when he had it, the smell of yeast was so very strong that he did not enjoy it at all. Well, it was not strong on the yeast when we had it but it was salty and not anything we would want to have again.

My missus had the clown gelato (RM15.80)…

…and she loved the mango flavour that she picked.

Actually, you can sample all the flavours available…

…before deciding on what you want. They are kept in this display freezer called the tonda (I understand there are only 2 in the country, one in KL and the other one here so that means it is the only one in East Malaysia) at a specific temperature…

…and they will let you try each of them on those little plastic spoons like at those ice cream places. I actually liked the teh tarek (the brown one) but they were running out of that at the time so I did not order it…while the peanut butter made me think of me poking my finger into the bottle and taking out some to eat just like that. They do not have this for the proper freezing process required at the old place so that was why the gelato I had there was served hard and I had to wait a bit before I could eat and enjoy it.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon while I was taking a photograph of the digital thermometer. The digits kept running and changing and when I looked at the real thing, the figures were, in fact, constant. I asked the guy and he did not know about this – he even tried with his smartphone camera and yes, that same thing happened too! Actually, it was negative something, – 14 or somewhere around there. If I am not wrong, they did say that ideally, it should be kept constantly at -12.

I did order their coffee, the long black, cold (RM7.90) and I thought it was good but no, we did not order any of the lattes or whatever. Iced water was on the house and yes, they do charge the 6% GST here…unfortunately.

Well, if you are wondering what the differences between gelato and ice cream are – no, they are not the same, you can take a look at this chart here…

…that I got from their Facebook page. Well, others may want to differ but I would prefer it with macaron, the way I had it once at the old place…