Ride the Taste Buds

Ever since I scored my first can of Vimto from the West African Grocery in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC, I find myself scouting out every ethnic food mart with the hope of uncovering ever more exotic carbonated beveraging. Oh and in case you ever do hit the West African Grocery, here’s a hard-earned tip: Vimto is not a suitable chaser for the green kola nuts displayed in sandwich bags near the cash register. That is, of course, unless you’re a cabbie from Burkina Faso.

Anyway, I roll past an Indian grocery called Delhi Bazaar (6531 Little River Turnpike) on my drive to work each day. I finally worked up the energy to deviate from my mad rush home each night to survey their beveraging opportunities. At first I was excited to find bottles of Thum’s Up, but the grime encrusting the bottles was offputting, and I had already sampled Thum’s Up previously. In case you're curious, Thums Up tastes a lot like coke except that it’s sweetened with sugar cane instead of high fructose corn syrup.

Then I spied these hideous bright green cans, emblazoned with the name “Pakola.” One of the charms of seeking out foreign sodas is the typically antiquated design of the packagin, and, of course, the fact that most foreign sodas are still packaged in glass bottles. Sadly, the Pakola can’s design was not entirely dissimilar to any number of American soft drinks currently on the market: an eyepopping logo on a background dappled with faux condensation drops to better inspire thoughts of thirst quenching.

Fortunately, I took the time to scrutinize the can further, and discovered the somewhat ambiguous descriptor “Ice Cream Soda.” Now having sampled all manner of South Asian ice creams and kulfis, I had no idea what ice cream soda could possibly entail. This seemed like a potentially big beveraging score, at least if one of your metrics for such a score is “high weirdness.”

The soda turns out to smell faintly of roses, even though the liquid itself is an otherwordly green. It turns out that Pakola is a lightly rose flavored cream soda. As for the ice cream inspiration behind the soda, falooda seems to be the most likely source, even though the falooda ice cream I’ve had has always had little bits of noodle in it.

The Pakola corporate website is surprisingly informative. It turns out that Pakola is not merely Pakistani (in retrospect, this seems stunningly obvious), but is, in fact, the “heart beat of the nation” as this following passage describes:

As per our slogan, “DIL BOLA …. Pakola”, we believe that Pakola is the heart beat of the nation and with its amazing taste holds the potential or ride the taste buds of the consumers at home and abroad. Although the green drink “Pakola Ice Cream Soda” is aynonyms with the name Pakola, but that’s not all, Pakola gives sensation by bottling other fruity flavors namely Pakola Orange, Pakola Lychee, Pakola Raspberry and Pakola Guava.

-AC