Food Review: Dessert at Big Chill - II

I’m not particularly big on milkshakes, although I don’t mind them occasionally. I’ll get to the milkshakes later though.

So I ordered my Mississippi Mud Pie from Big Chill, or The Big Chill for pedantry’s sake, and asked for takeaway. They prepared this neat little tin foil box with the dessert inside, a small plastic cup filled with aforementioned chocolate sauce, and put both duly into a jute bag, because plastic is so 20^th century.

Now I’m all for saving the environment, and plastic is bad and plastic bags are the scourge of the new-age hippies. But sometimes – every now and then – plastic is necessary. I genuinely believe that in the service industry – particularly in the hospitality sector – one should always account for the lowest common denominator, or the dumbest breed of people that will flock to your establishment for nourishment. In this tale of mine, I belong to that class of society that I just spoke about.

You see, the mud pie I had ordered is set largely in a base of ice-cream complemented with a thick crust. Ice-cream melts. Jute leaks.

So I was left with a big bag of leaking chocolate milk (with just the right amount of peanut butter for optimum taste pleasure) on my lap for the better part of 40 minutes, which was the length of my ride to my destination from Big Chill. I was in a car, so I had to do my very best not to spill even a smidgeon of the formerly solid-state dessert floating around in the box on my lap, for which I decided to sacrifice my sole pair of jeans.

I actually had two options; one of holding on to the jute bag and hoping and praying (which is what I did), and the other of actually using those two feeble plastic spoons inside the bag and eating before the mud pie melted completely. I chose the former, since eating the dessert in the car would have meant risking complete spillage disaster. And more importantly, I would have had to share. So I suffered in cold silence as the chocolate drip entered my socks even.

While in the car, I didn’t quite realize the magnitude of the problem. So I got home and opened the box, only to find decapitated crust bits floating around in a sea of brown milk. It was massacre. I tilted the box and drank all of it like milkshake. The chocolate sauce in the little plastic cup was still completely intact, so I gobbled that up neat. Worth it, I guess.

Like I said, the fault’s probably mine for not thinking things through, but the restaurant isn’t completely blameless either. They should have the good sense to have a couple of plastic bags handy for people who want to carry ice-cream dessert for 40 minutes in a car in Delhi heat.

Verdict: Dessert good, packaging not so much. Get some bloody plastic – out with the new, in with the old.

Rating: 3/7 – Fine, be ecologically conscious all you want. But let’s not be greedy tree-huggers? Or daft? If you really must maximize profits at the cost of customer jeans, then why not at least warn the foolhardy about the perils of ice-cream in jute bags in advance? Would have saved me a potential ant-picnic inside my pants.