Häagen-Dazs nouveau format: is there an easy way to eat it?

Häagen-Dazs chocolate chip cookie dough tub

A quick question for experienced cinema-goers. Häagen-Dazs has a new, larger variety of ice cream tub available to buy in cinemas called the "nouveau format" – or should that be "nöuveau"? I tried one last night, but it’s nearly impossible to eat from it.

It comes to you frozen into an ice block and you have a tiny plastic slat – I hesitate to call it a spoon – to eat the ice block with. You start scraping away in the dark with what you hope is the ‘eating’ end of the slat, although you can only tell for sure if you read Braille, until eventually you have enough, you think, for a minor mouthful. 

Then you try to find your lump of ice cream, which has rebonded with the motherload. If it’s chocolate-flavoured, good luck finding it in the dark. But if you do find it and stick your slat in to eat it, it turns out the ice cream has a tiny ejector seat fitted to it that propels it up into the air.

Am I correct in thinking that you have to wait until the ice block has defrosted sufficiently that you can use the slat properly to scoop up the ice cream and have it go all over the sides and your fingers? Or is there a better way?

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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