Shaved ice. Red beans, green beans, peanuts, taro balls, tapioca balls, something called "grass jelly". All sorts of textures and sweets. This is not your traditional dessert unless you are East Asian. But as with many cultural foods from all around the world, it can be found in good old New York City!
I don't think this has every ingredient I listed above, but it's possible. What's visible here are these chewy balls made from sweet potato and taro that have the natural sweetness of the ingredient. It's on this black jelly that has an herbal taste to it, also slightly sweet. Below that, which is invisible here, is shaved ice with the texture of snow, and below that: red beans. Poured over the whole thing is a bit of cream.
This day was a particularly hot summer day, and this was the perfect way to cool down and appease my apparently sweet tooth. It's a sweet tooth alright, but it doesn't like things that are too sweet.
Where can you get it? At this place called Meet Fresh. It's apparently a chain with locations in the West coast as well, and I'm not sure where else. I think it's a rather unfortunate name because when you say it, it sounds like reversed fresh meat, and that's pretty far off the mark. Ah well.
If you click into the the Yelp link you can see all sorts of other tasty iced dessert variants. In the winter, or when it turns cold, you can also see there are hot variants of the same dishes, and those are also tasty and will warm you up in the cold days. Talk about versatile. The only other place I've seen that kind of does something similar is a gelato place that in the winter time offers hot chocolate in addition. It is actually just melted chocolate gelato basically, but I think it's also tasty!
I'm salivating as I write this actually... I think it's time to pay this place another visit!