First Bite: Waffle Bar in LynLake
Hong Kong-style ice cream waffles have come to Minneapolis, just in time to snag a spot on your summer bucket list.
Waffle Bar, Minneapolis
It was already officially the summer of innovation in local ice cream, with the rolled ice creams, ultra-locavore ice creams, next-level ice creams, and so on. But then in the last week of May, Waffle Bar, a Hong Kong-style bubble waffle shop opened, bringing yet another deeper level of depth to your summer ice cream bucket list.
Want an explainer? For any veteran of Hong Kong street food, bubble or egg waffles are well known—food writer Janice Leung Hayes wrote a lovely history of them last year. These treats were born when a Portuguese sponge cake recipe met a Japanese mini-cake tradition, and then exploded around the world when modern folk paired them with soft serve and Instagram.
Waffle Bar, Minneapolis
Cotton Candy and Rock Candy sticks
Our new Minneapolis Waffle Bar takes this modern phenomenon and adds even, even more. On-site cotton candy, garnishes of rock candy, enough additional candy options to build a mountain to the sky should you so desire, and an Instagram wall to photograph your kids, your bubble waffle cone, or just strangers clustering in front of it Instagramming their own crazy piled high creations.
Waffle Bar, Minneapolis
The "Eye Candy" cone; not pictured, the whole cotton candy stick because it couldn't fit in the frame!
How is it? Sweet! The "Eye Candy" is a specialty cone that will make the jaw drop and the eyes pop of any kid in your life. Order it and you get a hot bubble waffle folded into a cone, filled with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and covered with gummy bears, multi-colored sprinkles, fruity rice crispies, edible glitter, a whole entire rock candy stick that you get to pick the color of, and a whole entire cotton candy stick, made in your choice of color right before your eyes. People, I have kids. This is the most sugar you can get for $8.75 in the metro, short of buying a bag of it and filling a wading pool, and who would do that? That's how you get ants.
There's another $8.75 mega mind-blower specialty cone that comes adorned with a full skewer of three just-roasted marshmallows. If you're the kind of Scrooge that can't fathom eating a whole stick of additional marshmallows beside your ice cream waffle sundae, then I will whisper to you that the ice cream itself is not all that amazing, it's just average. The presentation though, is staggeringly stupendous. Purists should know that you can get a plain bubble waffle for $4.50, but no right-thinking fourth grader will let you do that.
Anyhoo, add it to your mega ice cream summer, and the next time someone tells you that Minneapolis doesn't have much for Hong Kong street food desserts with cotton candy add-ons, tell them how wrong they are.
Waffle Bar, Minneapolis
Where a kid can be so happy!
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