It’s Friday night in wintry Sydney and I’m eating kakigori, a Japanese frozen dessert with a 1,000-year-old history. This shaved-ice wonder predates modern refrigeration by about 800 years and was originally enjoyed by the elites – you know, the types who could afford chilled blocks of water transported from Japanese mountains. Sei Shōnagon is the 10th-century noblewoman who first wrote about kakigori. I doubt her courtly life much resembles my day-to-day existence, but we both agree: a sweetened bowl of finely crushed ice is a marvel worth documenting.
Kakigori Kaiji in Sydney is only a few weeks old but it’s already popular; every table inside is taken, so I’m nursing a takeaway serve with others on the footpath. My honey-lemon kakigori tastes like a designer frozen Solo slushie. Each spoonful excavates a new joy: a bite of tart lemon peel, sweet lychee jelly, crunchy meringue biscuits. It’s a bracing take on kakigori and feels like the perfect “I can’t have dessert” dessert when you’re full. It’s refreshing and leaves my mouth with an electric citrus buzz.
But what’s special is that ice. Kakigori Kaiji owners Miho Wakatsuki and her husband, Warren, claim they’re the first in Sydney to use Kuramoto Ice, a company that produces ice from mountain waters in Kanazawa, near central Japan’s northern coast. (Just like the Japanese elites did a thousand years ago.)
The century-old company’s two-day process of freezing and agitating water from Mount Haku apparently creates pristine, slow-melting blocks that generate exceptional ice flakes.
And tasting it on that cold Sydney street, it’s true. These frozen shavings have a fairy-floss softness, which Kakigori Kaiji credits to ice that’s imported by sea in -18C freezer containers.
It’s also hard to believe it’s actually ice: the flakes are so refined, delicate and unlike the crunchy shards you munch through at the bottom of a jumbo-sized Coke at the cinema. They’re cushiony, like feathers, and sink easily under your spoon.
This designer ice is also reflected in the price: a bowl of kakigori can cost up to $26, although smaller takeaway serves begin at $14. The dine-in serves are also massive and can be easily split with friends – along with the bill.
Kakigori Kaiji’s “ice dealer” is Sebastian Kakigori, the acclaimed Melbourne dessert joint that also uses Kuramoto Ice. There, the signature creme brulee flavour is $35.
But the costs also reflect the skill involved in these shaved-ice extravaganzas.
At Kakigori Kaiji, I watch machines whirl through orders. A block of ice is loaded into an Ikenaga “Swan” SI-150C Ice Shaver. As it spins, it generates a mesmerising snowdrift of intricately shaven ice: fabric-like and frilly, like ruffles on a wedding dress. Staff pat these ice clouds into a bowl, add syrups, creams, fruits, biscuits, and bank the bowl with more layers of ice and toppings until the dessert is the size of an adult’s head.
“Do you know how serious we are about making kakigori?” Warren says. “We only use ice from Japan.” Their freezers are stacked with hundreds of 13cm cubes; at the counter, he shows customer the blocks, each as clear as glass used to showcase museum specimens.
I visit Kakigori Kaiji four times in four days, and try everything on the menu. The top-selling flavour is the matcha and red bean – it comes saturated with green tea powder grown in Mangrove Mountain on the New South Wales central coast. “That makes me happy because I’m from Kyoto,” Wakatsuki says, referring to the Japanese city known for its tea ceremonies and brews. Matcha and red bean is a classic kakigori combination, but can feel like the Ed Sheeran choice: popular, but no surprises.
On my first visit, I was accompanied by food photographer Alana Dimou, who knows more about kakigori than any Australian I know. In Holiday Notes, her self-published guide to Japan, she writes: “I’m passionate enough about the icy bowl to have bought my own small kakigori machine to trundle home with me, relieving me of the indignity of bashing ice cubes in a freezer bag with a mallet (true story).”
We try the strawberry and condensed milk foam, which is scarlet and rich with fruit; and the hazelnut and cafe-au-lait, with rum-flavoured mascarpone, coffee sauce and waffle pieces. It tastes like an icy, airy Ferrero Rocher.
These two flavours aren’t as experimental as the ones we’ve tried in Japan (I once ate a stunning tomato-and-three-cheese wonder that tasted like pizza), but they’re still revelatory. “Can’t talk, eating,” Dimou says, as we’re quietly awed by the flavours and textures elegantly amassed into each bowl.
But there’s a critical question: “Why can’t they just use ice from Australia?” my boyfriend asks me, after we conquer a double-chocolate kakigori charged with raspberry and Biscoff.
The owners considered it, but ultimately Kuramoto Ice was simply the softer, snowier, flakier – and most kakigori-appropriate – option. But it’s not the only dessert venue in Sydney to make imported ingredients a selling point. Rivareno Gelato proudly uses Sicilian lemon juice in its scoops; and at Indian dessert chain Icy Spicy, pulp sourced from Ratnagiri is key to their alphonso mango ice-cream. Kuramoto Ice claims to be four times more energy-efficient than local suppliers, and, says Warren, “they piggy-back on existing container ships to reduce carbon footprint”.
As a “tap water’s fine, thanks” person, I’m not a snob about H20. But the ice at Kakigori Kaiji doesn’t taste like the janky freezer burn in your ice cube tray. It doesn’t give you brain freeze. It’s a remarkable blank slate for syrups, sauces and invigorating lemon. I’m not a 10th-century Japanese noblewoman, but it turns out I am one of those types who can afford chilled blocks of water transported from Japanese mountains after all.
