I must have passed by Five Cows at TriNoma more than once but never really paid attention. Perhaps, I wouldn’t have today either if I didn’t have a bad craving for dessert. The point is, I never heard of Five Cows before. I didn’t know what kind of reputation it has, I didn’t have expectations, I only had hopes based on what I saw on its glass cake display case.
The ice cream was fine, I grant you that. Nothing extraordinary, believe me, but nothing to make you swear never to return either. My husband ordered the banana fruits fluff (above), our younger daughter, Alex, had a choco cookie concoction (below)…
… and our older girl, Sam, had something called blueberry rumble (below). As usual, we sampled what each other ordered so I can say in all honesty that the ice cream was not bad at all.
But, to be even more honest, I don’t know what the superlatives going around in blogs are all about. I read up when we got home and the applause given by bloggers to Five Cows desserts is reverberating. Curious, really, because Five Cows is just a repackaged and expanded Nestle ice cream house but it still serves Nestle ice cream. I was hoping that people would be wise enough not to fall into the trap that a new packaging does not makes a food product taste better. It’s such an old marketing gimmick which apparently still works because a lot of people feel that a classier ambience and a better location elevates the quality of food.
Now, let me tell you about the lemon torte that I ordered. Click the link to page two below because the lemon torte was what turned the Five Cows experience into a total disaster.
That’s the lemon torte in the photo above. If you look closely at the cream-colored layers, they are actually made of two parts — the lighter colored parts are ice cream and, below them, are the layers of iced lemon.
Here’s another photo of the same lemon torte from another angle just in case the layers are not so clear in the first photo. I was given a teaspoon with which to eat the lemon torte. No good — every part was rock hard so I asked for a dessert fork. The waitress came back with a dinner fork AND A KNIFE. I had my eyebrow raised at that point and asked again if they didn’t have a dessert fork. I mean, really, if you’re a restaurant whose menu is anchored on the desserts, you MUST HAVE dessert forks, right? But, no… Five minutes later, I realized that the waitress must have known what she was doing in giving me the dinner fork and knife.
The lemon torte was rock hard, I’ve said that already, right? So, I decided to just let the ice cream melt a little for better manageability. In five minutes, the ice cream was just fine. BUT the iced lemon remained rock hard. I mean, rock hard. When I forced the fork down through the entire height of the torte (is it really a torte when it’s that high? A torte, by definition, is something much thinner… but anyway…), the bloody thing flew in pieces — on the table, on the floor… My daughter, Sam, started cutting the “torte” with the knife — much the same way you would cut a steak.
In other words, I simply refused to finish the damn thing. You can see for yourself — half melted ice cream and iced lemon that retained its shape because it must be something closer to dry ice than ice.
Anyway, if you plan to go to Five Cows, stick with the ice cream, don’t expect a miraculous dessert experience and you’ll be okay. But you really don’t want to try the damn lemon torte.
