denny's maple bacon sundae review

dear instigator,

you were right, of course, in tipping me off to denny's new maple bacon sundae as part of their baconalia celebration.

the menu certainly looked promising:

with their description of the maple bacon sundae front-and-center:

bacon makes a classic ice cream sundae even more awesome.  we start with maple-flavored syrup, and a scoop of rich, creamy vanilla ice cream and then a generous sprinkle of our diced hickory-smoke bacon.  add another sweet layer of syrup and vanilla ice cream topped with even more bacon and a drizzle of syrup.

the person who shall never be mentioned and i each ordered one using the BOGO coupon that, to use the words of julia child, i had prepared earlier.

while waiting and wondering what the future might be, i got to look at the new bacon pyramid.  

sadly realizing that, as always, i'm eating too many items from the top, and not enough from the bottom.

somehow the kitchen managed to bang out the order quickly (even though there was an entire other family in the restaurant) and the sundae arrived.

the taste.  well.  how should i put this ... it was fine, but not great.  

i like my bacon "soft not crispy," and you just know that as soon as you show a piece of bacon to ice cream it's gonna stiffen up ... no matter how soft it is to begin with ... and of course that won't matter if the pig is baked to the point of being rye crisp .. which this was.

i have a pathological revulsion to hearing other people chew, so it was all i could do to keep my claws in as the person who shall never be mentioned ground through the top "sprinkle" layer ...

figuring that the sound of crunch in my head would drown out everything else, i dug in as well ...

a few things hit immediately.  

one is that the tastes aren't that far afield.  i mean, if you sit and think about it for a second, salted peanuts and bacon are definitely taste cousins ... salty, fat ... you get the idea.  and you wouldn't pause for a second to think about whether you could put a salty peanut on ice cream ... and that's ignoring the fact salted caramel ice cream is one of my favorite flavors.

another is that maple syrup is a somewhat subtle ice cream topping.  things like hot fudge and caramel pack a much bigger taste wallop, and really the only reason maple syrup stands up at breakfast is that you're serving it with fat over one of the more tasteless breads that can be found in the western flavor palate.  

and yet another is that the bacon flavor is very subtle.  part of this, for sure, is the fact that denny's uses cheap-ass bacon -- so it's thin and lacking flavor (or as woody allen puts it, "'the food in this place is really terrible.'  'yeah ... and such small portions").  the person who shall never be mentioned thought it added a certain smokiness to the ice cream flavor ... it seemed to me that all it really added was crunch.

of course the ice cream isn't very good, but what the hell do you expect?  it's denny's  and this sundae is costing me a buck and a half.  

so overall, i like the idea better than the execution.  but i'm not for a second going to say anything bad about it because there's some joker out there at denny's who fought like hell to get this concept pushed out to the planet ... and that person (almost certainly a guy) needs to be encouraged as much as possible.  

i've lost over 30 pounds since eating my first double down.  i can only assume that the more of this kind of stuff american chains bring out, the faster i'll hit my ideal weight.


and you've got to hand it to me, instigator.  i went from hearing about this, to shoveling one in my pie hole (at a discount) in less than two hours.  that's pretty goddamn responsive, eh?