02.09.08
Look A La Mode
Here’s another treat from Guinea Pigs Badmovie and LunarGeography, but it is not a treat from the great J-List gifting of ought seven. Nor is this from the J-listing before the great J-list giving. This treat came back with them from Seattle where they happened upon a fabulous, wonderful Japanese Snack Food Supplier and lo! Look A La Mode. How can you come back to Michigan not bearing Look A La Mode? You can’t apparently, which is why I am reviewing these for you today.
First off…hee! Look A La Mode. That’s plus pea points right there because it makes me laugh and also the name made badmovie bring these back with him. Good show A La Mode. Also, also they come all neatly packaged and stamped. Take a Look…
LOOK! Notice the different Os too, one’s a plain O and one’s a double barreled O so you can tell them apart. I like the look of the chocolate lumps too, they are nice and smooth with the promise of certain tastiness.
The back tells us that they will be filled with four different flavors: (L) Pineapple, (O-single) Strawberry, (O-double) Melon, and (K) Banana.
And this is where the charm peters out. The chocolate is cheap, waxy and very mediocre all around. The fillings all have a smidge of a chemical taste to them and none of the fillings were outstanding. We had the pineapple first and other than a bit of a tartness, we really couldn’t identify it as pineapple. We weren’t sure it wasn’t banana until we tasted the K blocks and decided that K was definitely banana, which left L pineapple. That was assuming that yellow was both pineapple and banana. Not all countries follow the same color conventions for food flavors. (The pic might lead you to believe that the colors are white and yellow but the reality check of it is that the yellow coloring is a lot lighter and the white is a tad yellow-y. In other words, not enough pigment to make a difference.)
The strawberry wasn’t any better really, although you could taste the strawberry flavor better than you could the pineapple. Not terribly much better but it was there in a light strawberryesque kind of way.
The melon had no scent to it and was ubiquitously generic bland melon.
The banana we decided was unfortunate banana. It was a better artificial banana than the pineapple was a pineapple but it was also the typical chemical banana flavor.
I think overall, the Pigs and I were vastly underwhelmed by Look A La Mode and found the flavors to range from bland to mildly unplesant. The name was cute and the candies were fun with their letter stamps and this could have been a really neat idea but…it wasn’t. I’ll grant it a half pea for the name and packaging (it contains fruits sauce!) and half a pea for the fun candies as well as half a pea for the general taste for a grand total of
Rating of 1.5 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas.
