Ice Week: Halo Haloooooooo

Halo-halo, which means "mix-mix" in Tagalog, is not an icy dessert. It is a disco in a glass. Here are just a few of the things in this picture: Shaved ice, sweetened condensed milk, ripe jackfruit, cubes of honey konjac jelly, beans, crisped rice, ube puree (the purple sweet-potato mass you see near the top), strips of clear jelly, sweet corn.

You can get halo-halo at Filipino restaurants like Inay's and Kusina Filipina in Beacon Hill, but I drove down to the Vietnamese mini-mall on Othello and MLK to finally check out Halu-Halo (6951 Martin Luther King Jr., 722-4760), a corner store selling snacks, a few steam-table items, soft-serve ice cream, and halo halo.

Not only did the mother-daughter team who run the place upsell me from a regular halo-halo ($5) to the deluxe version ($5.79), the entire cafe gathered around while the mom mixed it up for me and my friend, explaining ingredients and hyping up how good halo halo is.

The super version comes topped with a jiggly square of leche flan (custard) and a scoop of cheese-and-corn ice cream, which is a) milder in flavor than you might think and b) one ingredient too much. Dealing with the ice cream scoop simply delays you from doing the halo-halo-ing, stabbing your plastic spoon deep into the glass to break up the shaved ice, stirring it together with the milk and sweet stuff at the bottom, and pulling up brightly colored, chewy treasures.

Yes, it's sugary. Yes, you will have a brain freeze. Yes, it contains corn. (Is that so different from the salted caramel, buttered popcorn, and stout ice creams Seattle's going crazy for?) Halo-halo also lowers your body temperature by 5 degrees. If that isn't functional food, I don't know what is.