No Ice, Please
At some point in the journey of my life, I became a bit of a soda snob. I suppose that’s what happens when your tastebuds continue rejecting coffee and tea into adulthood. Caffeine must be acquired from somewhere. As a soda connoisseur, I have many preferences, some more important than others. Fountain soda is top tier, and glass bottles are a rare but wonderful vessel, yet still I’ll always love a classic can, and will reluctantly deal with a plastic bottle. I could easily rank the various popular brands and flavors too, but that’s not what this is about. My mission here is to spread my most sacred soda preference, the doctrine of no ice.
Why does every restaurant, no matter how fancy or cheap, insist on shoveling ice into two-thirds of the cup? I don’t even care so much about the space it takes up, although I’m not particularly happy about that either. It’s the way it affects the flavor that I’m most concerned about. You probably don’t even realize how watered-down your drink tastes. But I do. I can’t tell you how many times the luscious cherry notes of Dr. Pepper or the exquisite vanilla and slight citrus flavors in Coke have been corrupted by the melting of ice cubes. And for what? Fountain soda, the usual type at restaurants, is already cold. Unless the drink is sitting in a blazing heat, I have found that it stays cool for at least an hour, but this experience is unknown to those who have lived their whole lives with ice. Cans and bottles may cause issues, but there are still easy work-arounds. Notably, I don’t recall ever going to a restaurant that served a can or bottle which wasn’t already cold. The situations in which you encounter a warm or room-temperature soda are ones where you can simply pop it into a fridge or cooler for 30 minutes. Sometimes, I’ll even choose to drink a room-temperature soda instead of waiting, but it depends on my mood. To those who will jump to argue and ask “but what if there’s no fridge or cooler available?” I say this: then there wouldn’t be any ice either.
Why is this such a difficult concept to grasp for Americans? Yes, I do specifically say Americans, because the United States is the only country I know of with such an absolute obsession with ice. In European nations, you might get a couple cubes, but often not even that. Visitors to the US are shocked by the arctic state of their drinks, especially since restaurant ice is notoriously dirty. I envy their naivety. Despite politely asking for no ice, I occasionally still receive a glacial glass of soda. As the saying goes, I’m not surprised, just disappointed. I long for a world in which it is the ice-lover who is labeled eccentric and high-maintenance, and must brace for an incorrect drink order. Besides, it’s easy to add ice cubes to a glass, but it’s much harder to remove them once the melting has begun. So please, join me in my crusade to protect flavor integrity, and tell your server “no ice, please.”