Banana split
If you're looking to fight the season's oppressive heat with something freezing cold and sweet, your savior is waiting for you on Nolensville Road. Tucked away in an unassuming strip mall that's hidden behind a gas station just north of the Nashville Zoo at Grassmere, La Michoacana Premium is easy to miss — especially with the shop's driveway obscured behind an overgrown tree that blocks a giant vertical sign promising "ICE CREAM." But once inside, past the tree and before the zoo, your mind will spin as you attempt to take in the Mexican ice cream shop's overwhelming array of goodies.
La Michoacana doesn't look like so many of Nashville's other dessert shops, which are often crowded and painfully styled with Edison light bulbs, chalkboard walls and reclaimed barn-wood tables and/or stools that might look hip but hurt most asses. Here, bright fluorescent lights reflect off the gleaming floors, and panels of glass line the freezer cases that stretch for yards. There's plenty of room to accommodate a line with as many as 20 people — not rare on weekends. Posters and lighted signs decorated with splashy fruit drinks and picture-perfect ice cream creations hang on nearly every wall, and TV screens flash with menus boasting the shop's many dessert and snack options in both Spanish and English.
In each freezer case sits a vibrant mess of colors. On the left side, dozens of flavors of freshly made paletas — or ice pops — are stacked high, with all their ingredients easy to see: cookies-and-cream is packed with whole Oreo cookies, piña colada is a swirl of pale-orange and white ice cream finished off with a bright-red maraschino cherry, and cereal milk is peppered with corn flakes that hold a delightful chew when frozen in the sweet milk mixture.
Other flavors — including mango, kiwi and strawberry — entice with vibrant chunks of fruit. One paleta looks like an edible package of confetti on a stick and boasts a little bit of everything: grape halves and small bits of pineapple, strawberries, apples and mango.
Down the line are the ice cream and sorbets in flavors like tamarind, mango, pistachio and queso (yes, cheese). Some tubs have whole candy bars, cookies, nuts and fruit arranged neatly on top, while others have been swirled to look like big, delicious roses or finished off with sprinkles or a pretty crisscross pattern. Though a few of the flavors are labeled, many are not, but the staff will happily answer all your questions and let you sample as many different kinds as you'd like. (And though it might not be appealing to the uninitiated, do at least try the queso ice cream — it's not as sweet as many of the other flavors, and it's loaded with bits of shredded cheese that give it a shredded coconut-like texture. Absolutely delicious.)
La Michoacana Premium sounds like an ice cream lover's fantasy come to life, right? In a way, it is. The shop is a dream come true for owner Salvador Alonso Reyes, who opened it one year ago with his son Antonio Alonso. Speaking to the Scene through an interpreter, Salvador, who has lived in Nashville for 16 years, says he spent many years learning how to make all the popsicles and ice cream in Mexico and has always dreamed of opening his own business — and now La Michoacana Premium is so busy that some days he has to make up to 500 paletas or 10 different batches of ice cream to keep up with demand.
To many, the flavors offered at La Michoacana Premium aren't new or unique. Salvador says there are thousands of La Michoacana ice cream shops in Mexico (and even a few more franchises here in Nashville and Middle Tennessee), and the flavors they carry — queso, rice-and-raisin, and tequila with sliced almonds — are flavors Salvador has been eating since he was a kid. But one of the shop's most popular items, the Mangonada, a vibrant sundae made of mango sorbet, lime juice, chamoy sauce and tajin, is newer to Mexico's food scene.
Chamoy, if you've never had it, is a complex and polarizing flavor. The sauce is made from fruit, chiles and citrus juice and it's bitter, sweet, spicy and salty. It's overwhelming on its own — the concentrated sauce confuses the tongue, zapping different taste buds with all kinds of sensations — but when mixed with a light sorbet, the sauce is diffused, adding an interesting layer of flavors to a sweet sorbet that could otherwise prove to be a bit one-note on its own.
La Michoacana Premium, wisely, has something to offset all the sweets, too. The shop's back wall is lined with hundreds of single-serving bags of Doritos, Cheetos, Churritos and Tostitos, all waiting to be turned into Dorilocos, a genius hand-held snack made by cutting the bags of chips open lengthwise and topping the contents with cabbage, pico de gallo, crispy pork skin, cream, avocado and nuts. It's the perfect crunchy and spicy snack to offset a stomach full of sugar soup.
On Fourth of July weekend, La Michoacana Premium celebrated its one-year anniversary, but the family had another reason to celebrate: They're planning on opening a second location at Murfreesboro Pike and Bell Road near Antioch. They've just begun the building process, so it won't be ready for a few months — but at least there's plenty of room for all in their current spot. For now, at least. Assuming you don't drive right past the turn because of that dumb tree.
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