A Survey of the Frozen Yogurt Places On the Block Where I Work
There are five frozen yogurt places on the block where I work. I have worked on this block for two years and one week, and I have patronized each of these places an average of .65 times if calculated based on the whole of my frozen yogurt consumption over my tenure on the block. Not one of these frozen yogurt places has stayed open for longer than 3 1/2 months (with the exception of Pinkberry), and the 3 1/2 month lifecyle of each yogurt storefront does not necessarily coincide with the summer months. The summary that ensues should be understood as my impression of the five frozen yogurt vendors on the street; it should not be read as a business review, but rather as a documentation of facts as my mind perceives and keeps facts.
1. Pinkberry. Pinkberry is green and pink and white and patronized by a line of people coming from the gym around the corner, and stay-at-home moms with their fat little children. Pinkberry is the frozen yogurt place farthest from my office. Pinkberry has tiny pebbles that are glued together for the flooring. Pinkberry frozen yogurt melts pretty fast and gets mucousy when it's not rigid anymore. I had a plain yogurt with strawberries from Pinkberry, and I swear there were mustache shavings in it.
2. Yogurpia. Yogurpia is closed now. Yogurpia is now the Family Milkshake Shop and Occult Reading Room. But "Yogurpia" still has got to be the worst name for any place that attempts to serve food in the English-speaking areas of north America. "Yogurpia" sounds like a word that means "Yogurt Burp." The yogurt at Yogurpia was irritating, but not offensive. Yogurpia's yogurt was pleasantly metallic tasting: it did not feign to be anything other than what frozen yogurt is; frozen yogurt is a bunch of carcinogenic chemicals, frozen. I went to Yogurpia twice. On the way to Yogurpia, one would walk by a Mexican restaurant that serves you pre-packaged frozen Mexican foods, deep-fried. One would also pass by a hardware store that sells designer scented candles and kitchen-themed bric-a-brac, such as a ceramic chicken wearing an apron and holding a silver serving tray. Yogurpia: I don't miss it, but the Yogurpia experience was worth the $3.75 dollop of frozen edible material.
3. The Family Milkshake Shop and Occult Reading Room. When Yogurpia closed, my coworkers and I wondered what would come of it, because within a week, there was already another frozen yogurt place under construction across the street from old Yogurpia. (I will get to that place later.) We were certain that there could not be four contemporaneous frozen yogurt purveyors at the time. But sure enough, construction started on The Family Milkshake Shop and Occult Reading Room. It's real name is "Millions of Milkshakes," and they sell both frozen yogurt and frozen evaporated-milk-sugar-product. I renamed it 'Family' because it is clearly not a chain. It can't possibly be a chain unless it's a chain that only has franchises in places where a lot of Sceintologists live. One half of the floorplan is dedicated to a very glitter-covered milkshake and yogurt countertop, while the other half of the space is outfitted with custom, opalized Formica display shelves, on which are displayed (I'm sure, not often touched) hardcover editions of the following books: Dianetics, 2012: Beyond the Mythology, Expanding Your Consciosness, Transcendental Meditation, and Stranger in a Strange Land. I understand why these books are here though: of course one should expect to arrive at the point of a personal mental struggle if all he or she eats is frozen, sauced sodium citrate and carageenan. 'Family' does not play music and the sounds are similar to the sounds of a McDonalds.
4. Pump It!. "Whoa! Pump What?," I thought when I caught first glimpse of Pump It! two weeks before its opening date. A double-than-life-sized poster graced the entire front window. On this poster was a mudflap girl: you know, the boobie sihouette you see on the back of 18-wheelers. But she was grabbing a large shaft- or udder. One could not discern what it was, but it was easy enough to assume, within several seconds of receiving nausea, that she was holding a yogurt pump, which is how one self-serves him or herself when they Pump It!. Pump It! took down the poster maybe two days after it went up. They opened about two weeks later. Their yogurt is by far the most intriguing on the street. I can not say that it is "good," but I did conclude that it was super space-age! This was an exciting discovery of extra-planetary tastes for me. Two flavors enticed me the most; irish mint chocolate chip (no visible chocolate chips, no visible chocolate- just green), and cookies and cream (no visible cookie crumbles, no visible cream- just a pleasant warm grey). But wholly shit. These flavors were more real than real itself. It was only possible that aliens had synthesized these flavors, because they were as real as the illusion of a beach on Earth that Jodie Foster is transported to in the end of Contact. (But the beach is really in another part of the Universe and the aliens only made it look like an Earth beach, because that was a comforting place to Earth people. And Jodie Foster could feel the sand!) I returned to Pump it! today, probably because writing about frozen yogurt had put frozen yogurt on my mind, and there was loud techno blasting air out the front door. A pleasant looking man had tied his cocker spaniel's leash to a plastic chair out front, but the chair was too light- and the spaniel, most certainly drawn by the magnificence of space-age yogurt, managed to pull the chair inside, so, inside, there was techno blasting, a dog running around with a chair tied to it, and 10 or so fat teenagers wearing lots of charms and complaining that there wasn't a large enough selection of bowls in which to Pump It!. As if the God-like synthetica of yogurt flavors didn't win me over! Life could not have been much better than it was at Pump It! today, February 3rd, 2009.
5. Fake Pinkberry. Oh right- this place was called "Yogurtberry." Whatever. Fake Pinkberry was open for only 1.5 months. I never went in to Fake Pinkberry. Fake Pinkberry was not green and pink and white like Pinkberry: it was pink and white and green. They are a different order. Fake Pinkberry's exterior differed from Pinkberry because it was tiled in pink. Actually, the entire thing was really pink. And the tile was iridescent. There was a pink tiled patio before the entrance and there were pink chairs out front on that patio. I walked past Fake Pinkberry coming back from coffee with a colleague a few weeks ago. Fake Pinkberry was on the north side of the street and we were walking west. My colleague was to my north, in between myself and Fake Pinkberry at the time when we passed it. She said, "Hey, look- Fake Pinkberry is now a Psychic." I turned toward my colleague and Fake Pinkberry to look, and there was a giant pink tarp that said "PSYCHIC" in pink on it. It was tacked on to the facade in front of the old "Yogurtberry" sign. Something about this caused me to laugh so suddenly that I actually spit all of my coffee onto my colleague. I imagine that the psychic must have pink hair, pink fingernails, and a pink dyed caftan.
In conclusion, the frozen yogurt available at the 8900 block of Santa Monica Boulevard challenges both the palate and the mind. What's more absurd, I ask myself: that we as humans have a healthy constituency of trancscendental Scientologists and psychic-goers- or that we eat frozen yogurt? I can never figure it out. Is it possible that a street be zoned for "frozen yogurt sales and obscure businesses only", or is a microculture birthing itself at the corner of Santa Monica and Robertson Boulevards? We will never know, unless we contact the Los Angeles City Building Department. Do fat children eat frozen yogurt (but not ice cream) because they are fat, or are they fat because they eat frozen yogurt (and ice cream)? Perhaps we might entertain an academic study of obesity. These mostly unanswerable Froyo questions linger in the sour-sweet milky chemical air that hovers about the doors of Santa Monica's frozen yogurt shops.
1. Pinkberry. Pinkberry is green and pink and white and patronized by a line of people coming from the gym around the corner, and stay-at-home moms with their fat little children. Pinkberry is the frozen yogurt place farthest from my office. Pinkberry has tiny pebbles that are glued together for the flooring. Pinkberry frozen yogurt melts pretty fast and gets mucousy when it's not rigid anymore. I had a plain yogurt with strawberries from Pinkberry, and I swear there were mustache shavings in it.
2. Yogurpia. Yogurpia is closed now. Yogurpia is now the Family Milkshake Shop and Occult Reading Room. But "Yogurpia" still has got to be the worst name for any place that attempts to serve food in the English-speaking areas of north America. "Yogurpia" sounds like a word that means "Yogurt Burp." The yogurt at Yogurpia was irritating, but not offensive. Yogurpia's yogurt was pleasantly metallic tasting: it did not feign to be anything other than what frozen yogurt is; frozen yogurt is a bunch of carcinogenic chemicals, frozen. I went to Yogurpia twice. On the way to Yogurpia, one would walk by a Mexican restaurant that serves you pre-packaged frozen Mexican foods, deep-fried. One would also pass by a hardware store that sells designer scented candles and kitchen-themed bric-a-brac, such as a ceramic chicken wearing an apron and holding a silver serving tray. Yogurpia: I don't miss it, but the Yogurpia experience was worth the $3.75 dollop of frozen edible material.
3. The Family Milkshake Shop and Occult Reading Room. When Yogurpia closed, my coworkers and I wondered what would come of it, because within a week, there was already another frozen yogurt place under construction across the street from old Yogurpia. (I will get to that place later.) We were certain that there could not be four contemporaneous frozen yogurt purveyors at the time. But sure enough, construction started on The Family Milkshake Shop and Occult Reading Room. It's real name is "Millions of Milkshakes," and they sell both frozen yogurt and frozen evaporated-milk-sugar-product. I renamed it 'Family' because it is clearly not a chain. It can't possibly be a chain unless it's a chain that only has franchises in places where a lot of Sceintologists live. One half of the floorplan is dedicated to a very glitter-covered milkshake and yogurt countertop, while the other half of the space is outfitted with custom, opalized Formica display shelves, on which are displayed (I'm sure, not often touched) hardcover editions of the following books: Dianetics, 2012: Beyond the Mythology, Expanding Your Consciosness, Transcendental Meditation, and Stranger in a Strange Land. I understand why these books are here though: of course one should expect to arrive at the point of a personal mental struggle if all he or she eats is frozen, sauced sodium citrate and carageenan. 'Family' does not play music and the sounds are similar to the sounds of a McDonalds.
4. Pump It!. "Whoa! Pump What?," I thought when I caught first glimpse of Pump It! two weeks before its opening date. A double-than-life-sized poster graced the entire front window. On this poster was a mudflap girl: you know, the boobie sihouette you see on the back of 18-wheelers. But she was grabbing a large shaft- or udder. One could not discern what it was, but it was easy enough to assume, within several seconds of receiving nausea, that she was holding a yogurt pump, which is how one self-serves him or herself when they Pump It!. Pump It! took down the poster maybe two days after it went up. They opened about two weeks later. Their yogurt is by far the most intriguing on the street. I can not say that it is "good," but I did conclude that it was super space-age! This was an exciting discovery of extra-planetary tastes for me. Two flavors enticed me the most; irish mint chocolate chip (no visible chocolate chips, no visible chocolate- just green), and cookies and cream (no visible cookie crumbles, no visible cream- just a pleasant warm grey). But wholly shit. These flavors were more real than real itself. It was only possible that aliens had synthesized these flavors, because they were as real as the illusion of a beach on Earth that Jodie Foster is transported to in the end of Contact. (But the beach is really in another part of the Universe and the aliens only made it look like an Earth beach, because that was a comforting place to Earth people. And Jodie Foster could feel the sand!) I returned to Pump it! today, probably because writing about frozen yogurt had put frozen yogurt on my mind, and there was loud techno blasting air out the front door. A pleasant looking man had tied his cocker spaniel's leash to a plastic chair out front, but the chair was too light- and the spaniel, most certainly drawn by the magnificence of space-age yogurt, managed to pull the chair inside, so, inside, there was techno blasting, a dog running around with a chair tied to it, and 10 or so fat teenagers wearing lots of charms and complaining that there wasn't a large enough selection of bowls in which to Pump It!. As if the God-like synthetica of yogurt flavors didn't win me over! Life could not have been much better than it was at Pump It! today, February 3rd, 2009.
5. Fake Pinkberry. Oh right- this place was called "Yogurtberry." Whatever. Fake Pinkberry was open for only 1.5 months. I never went in to Fake Pinkberry. Fake Pinkberry was not green and pink and white like Pinkberry: it was pink and white and green. They are a different order. Fake Pinkberry's exterior differed from Pinkberry because it was tiled in pink. Actually, the entire thing was really pink. And the tile was iridescent. There was a pink tiled patio before the entrance and there were pink chairs out front on that patio. I walked past Fake Pinkberry coming back from coffee with a colleague a few weeks ago. Fake Pinkberry was on the north side of the street and we were walking west. My colleague was to my north, in between myself and Fake Pinkberry at the time when we passed it. She said, "Hey, look- Fake Pinkberry is now a Psychic." I turned toward my colleague and Fake Pinkberry to look, and there was a giant pink tarp that said "PSYCHIC" in pink on it. It was tacked on to the facade in front of the old "Yogurtberry" sign. Something about this caused me to laugh so suddenly that I actually spit all of my coffee onto my colleague. I imagine that the psychic must have pink hair, pink fingernails, and a pink dyed caftan.
In conclusion, the frozen yogurt available at the 8900 block of Santa Monica Boulevard challenges both the palate and the mind. What's more absurd, I ask myself: that we as humans have a healthy constituency of trancscendental Scientologists and psychic-goers- or that we eat frozen yogurt? I can never figure it out. Is it possible that a street be zoned for "frozen yogurt sales and obscure businesses only", or is a microculture birthing itself at the corner of Santa Monica and Robertson Boulevards? We will never know, unless we contact the Los Angeles City Building Department. Do fat children eat frozen yogurt (but not ice cream) because they are fat, or are they fat because they eat frozen yogurt (and ice cream)? Perhaps we might entertain an academic study of obesity. These mostly unanswerable Froyo questions linger in the sour-sweet milky chemical air that hovers about the doors of Santa Monica's frozen yogurt shops.
posted by Kir at 2:04 PM
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