TLO Restaurant Review: Nevería y Paleteria Michi Ice

8:31 AM EST on February 11, 2020

It was sometime last week when I finally got a chance to stop in at the frozen treat shop Michi Ice, 4100 N. MacArthur Blvd., ready for a dinner-destroying snack of dulces y golosinas, something that they’re best known for. I was taken aback, however, when I noticed that past the minimal grocery store, there was a second restaurant offering one of my own troubling obsessions, El Salvadorian pupusas.

That ice cream was just gonna have to wait, ese.

With different edible innards wrapped in corn-meal flatbread and cooked on a hot griddle, at $2.50 each, I ordered the Frijol con Queso, the Chicharron con Queso and the vaunted Loroco con Queso, a type of floral food source. Plated like the most heavenly stack of hotcakes you’ve ever seen, these pupusas are the things that my sueños más hambrientos are heavily made of.

Served with a side of slaw and hot sauce, I also ordered a Maiz Gordita with Nopales ($2.50). Featuring bits of chopped cactus cooked between two fat sheaths of corn, it made for an indelible meat mistress, especially when mixed with their superb rojo salsa, avoiding the viscoso texture that many times accompanies the desert veg.

I had to box up most of this lunch however, because there’s no way I was going to leave Michi without painfully irritating my dientes sensibles on some of their premium ice cream flavors like Gansito (a popular brand of pastry) and Ron con Pasa (rum and raisins), two tastes that those drones corporativos at Baskin-Robbins only wish they had.

But, if you’re needing a truly original treat that’ll have you giving derogatory hand gestures to every other snack in a mile radius, then the Takis Con Queso ($3.50) is your object of deseo. A bag of spicy Takis Fuego rolled corn chips are poured into a clear container and not only is nacho cheese dropped on top, but they are then gifted with sliced jalapenos and grated cotija.

As I sat there, my fingers sticky from molesting the errant cheese of the Takis con Queso, I realized that I will always be willing to get my snack-based high on Michi Ice's supply, walking out with a big cup of homemade horchata for the ride home. Cómpralo ya!