I encountered the fritter during my second visit to LUCK, the casual eatery featuring 40 taps of beer that opened in Trinity Groves last year. I'd just slogged my way through a lackluster meal and was expecting the same from the desserts as I talked my order out with my server.
See also: This Week's Review: LUCK Needs More Skill to Survive
Any dessert at LUCK can be ordered a la mode, a move that graces your chosen sweet with a scoop of ice cream, but my server was pushing that ice cream hard. You could also order your dessert alone and add an order of ice cream yourself, resulting in twice the frozen dairy. So I took the second option, mostly because I was eating with a friend and I didn't want to have to share in case the ice cream turned out to be good.
I should have taken the option twice over.
Back in the kitchen Lakewood Temptress Milk Stout is simmered down to a heavy reduction to flavor the ice cream. If you've had the beer you already know it's intense straight out of the tap, robust with chocolate and coffee flavors. Reduced down those flavors are a perfect match for hand made ice cream, which turns out to be the perfect foil for a delicate, perfectly fried fritter laced with bits of apple. Our plate was clean a lot faster than I expected and I planned on coming back and ordering the dessert again.
The only problem is it was never available. The fritter was offered but the ice cream always sold out earlier in the evening. It's made in a small churner, the same kind you'd use at home, which produces a serious capacity problem for a restaurant -- especially when the dessert in question garners this much demand. A woman sitting next to me at the bar was heart broken when she found out the beer ice cream had sold out.
Go early. Order quickly. This dessert's a keeper.
