Sweet of the Week: Tropical Italian Ice at Miko's Italian Ice

When it comes to hot-weather desserts, people usually reserve most of their hungry screams for ice cream. Listen, I get it. I love ice cream as much as the next mint chocolate chip junkie. But there's lots more to summertime sweets than ice cream cones. Notably, Italian ice. This seasonal sensation is just as refreshing and saccharine as the most salacious ice cream cone, albeit less indulgent and heavy. So it's sort of the best of both worlds. I can eat a massive portion of Italian ice and not feel like a monster. And there's nothing quite as vigorously satisfying as wandering around a park on a warm summer evening with a hefty cup of Italian ice in hand. My favorite pick is Miko's Italian Ice, a rustic window in Logan Square (and Bucktown) stocked with fruity flavors of snow cone-like confections. 

(Miko's Italian Ice)

Miko's is an institution on the northwest side of Chicago, a seasonal entity renowned for its fruit-forward ices. It's the perfect punctuation point to a warm, humid day in the city, especially in that flavors skew tropical and refreshing. My favorite is passion fruit, mostly because I am a whore for passion fruit anything, but also because this is passion fruit in its most supremely satisfying form. It's at once tart, tangy, and sweet in a lemonade-y way. At Miko's, customers can also do combos of two flavors, and I like to round out my passion fruit with a little mango. The two work in perfect tropical harmony to create a flavorful one-two punch of juicy dessert nourishment. 

- Matt Kirouac