Defining Chocolate

Back in high school, there was a place many of us went on Friday nights after football games or a movie at the Paramount, a place called Hopper’s where you sat in the privacy of your car and got curb service burgers and malts. It was a great place to take a date if you were short of money, and at seventeen that was most of the time. Hopper’s Drive-In started out in Baton Rouge as a family-run ice cream shop in the late 1940s, but by the time we got to high school the owners had opened two or three drive-ins and expanded the menu to include hamburgers, fries and milkshakes. The taste that lingers in my memory of those salad days is not the oniony flavor of hamburger or the super sweetness of a hot fudge sundae but the simple malted goodness of their chocolate milkshakes delivered by a college kid in white shirt and black bow tie running with a metal tray that hooked to the driver’s side window opening. Those long ago Friday night milkshakes define for me not only a time of life, but the flavor of chocolate at its best.

And wasn’t it great in those days to have no notion of things like calories, fat grams and cholesterol? Oh sure, our modern understanding of the food we eat has multiple benefits, but who can deny it has badly shaken the spontaneity of pleasurable eating and drinking. Sometimes health-conscious eating is a crashing bore, and that coming from one who doesn’t drink a glass of Perrier without studying the label. Despite that, sitting here lost in thoughts of a bygone Hopper’s and their chocolate malts I practically drool with the desire for a big thirty-two ounce stainless steel cup of just mixed ice cream, milk and chocolate syrup.    

Walgreens is currently running a television commercial in which they claim credit for “inventing” the first chocolate malt. Some might question whether that claim is altogether true, but it is a fact that in 1922 a distracted Walgreens soda jerk ‘accidentally’ added two scoops of vanilla ice cream to the standard malted milk drink and came up with what they called a milkshake—a recipe of milk, ice cream, chocolate syrup and malt powder.

The word ‘milkshake’ was coined way back in 1885 but used at the time to describe an alcoholic drink of whiskey and eggs. It wasn’t until 1900 that a milkshake became a hand-shaken mixture of crushed ice and milk, sugar, and flavorings. The Hamilton Beach Cyclone drink mixer with its spindle and metal cup appeared in 1911 and soon became the iconic milkshake mixer. It was then that ice cream got added to the mix bringing the milkshake closer to what we know today. The Walgreens malted milkshake coincided with the 1922 invention of the electric blender, a device that eventually brought milkshakes into the home.

Certainly there are a thousand and one places famous for making the ‘best’ chocolate milkshakes and we all have our favorites. Unfortunately, for many of us the chance to go back again to a favorite drive-in or malt shop from younger days is now nothing more than a nostalgic dream. Still, there are places that serve what some call world-class milkshakes, and if you’re lucky there’s one not far from home. There’s never a time that I skip the chance to have a chocolate milkshake at Johnny Rockets when shopping at the Mall of Millennia in Orlando, Florida. It’s a drive of a couple of hours, but shopping sometimes requires it and I can write off the long drive knowing that an almost Hopper’s chocolate milkshake is on the lunch menu.

Hangin’ Out at the Mall

Driving west on I-4 for a little over an hour takes me to a giant shopping mall called Mall of the Millennia. Like most malls, this one too has what seems like a hundred stores on two levels, including three department stores (Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Neiman-Marcus), an Apple Store, Montblanc, the best of all hamburger restaurants, valet parking, and a million people. Visitors from Japan love this kind of thing, so we made a day of it this Monday.

Kumiko and Ikuko arrived at the mall with stars in their eyes, comfortable walking shoes on their feet and a stack of credit cards in hand. One minute inside the main entrance and there was a gasp on either side of me as the Ann Taylor store came into view. I didn’t need words to understand that it was time for me to leave them to it, while I went off to Apple and Montblanc. We agreed to meet later for lunch at Johnny Rockets.

The Apple Store at Millennia is design-wise nothing special, little more than a big rectangle with hardware on tables, and software, along with accessories on racks along the back half of the store; Genius Bar at the far end. It’s nowhere near as cool as the Manhattan glass cube store, or either of the two Tokyo stores, one of which features a glass spiral staircase leading to the upper floors, and the Ginza store which occupies its own multi-storied building. On visits to an Apple Store anywhere chances are you will find it crowded, but now with release of the iPad and the iPhone 4, you almost have to wait in line to get inside. To meet the surge of curious browser-buyers, Apple has increased the number of store personnel greatly. There were at least thirty blue-shirted employees in the Millennia store today, but unlike earlier days, not all of them are Mac professionals. They are all friendly and quick to help, but I talked at length with four of them today, and two impressed me as still learning the Mac architecture. No complaint intended. Mac professional or not, they are still good sales people and managed to separate me from almost $200.

Entering the Montblanc store, I crossed over the gates of heaven. It is the ONLY place within a hundred miles or more where I can handle and sample fountain pens and ink, and you can be certain I did that today. First on my mind was ink, and I had a deep down hope that the Millennia store would somehow have an unsold bottle of either Racing Green or Turquoise. But I got a quick no on that request. Still, there were unfamiliar colors for me to sample. Surprising to see that the bottles, boxes and color names are different from what you find in Japan. For example, what in Japan is called Deep Violet is called Lavender Violet here. The bottle in Japan holds 50ml, while the bottles I sampled today hold 60ml. The familiar rounded end opposite the cap is not rounded but square. It looks more old-fashioned, and that I like.

After playing around with half a dozen fountain pens and several colors of ink, I settled on an elegant, aristocratic-looking gray ink named Oyster Grey, and a twin to Montblanc’s Sepia, here called Toffee Brown. For reasons I haven’t figured out, the company is using different ink names here and in Japan. Samples of the Oyster Grey and Toffee Brown will be upcoming in a later post.

Johnny Rockets retro 50s hamburger restaurants are located in sixteen or seventeen countries, and thirty-one states in the US. For a long time it has been my favorite place for hamburgers, and since it is not in Japan, I wanted to introduce rocket burgers to my guests. The whole experience is a throwback to the kind of hamburger shops that were popular in the 1950s, and the burgers, though now offered in combinations wider than the lettuce, tomato & pickle hamburgers of long ago, have that great flavor I remember from high school, nights at Hoppers and curb service. Strange as it seems, we had a waiter today who grew up in Japan, so amidst all that 1950s Americana we ordered our lunch in Japanese.

After lunch we separated again and when next we came together I could hardly find the two ladies behind all the shopping bags. And so, with the trunk filled, we joined the late afternoon traffic on I-4 heading east.