Checking in at: Polish Water Ice, Seaside Heights NJ

Polish Water Ice’s specialty is water ice that’s made in and served from soft-serve machines. It’s a growing chain with two locations on the Seaside Heights boardwalk, where they aggressively offer free samples. The texture really is super-smooth for water ice. All the flavors are based on sweetened, neutral-tasting grape and/or apple juice, with stabilizers and preservatives. There’s no peach in the peach ice or cherry in the cherry ice – the flavors are all artificial.

Granted, the watermelon ice we tried was super-refreshing, thanks in large part to the fact that they used a light hand in both the sweetening and the dose of flavoring. The mango we sampled seemed sweeter and darned if the mango flavor wasn’t pretty true. Artificial flavorings must be moving up in the world. Now if someone would invent a real fruit version of these ices, we’d get behind it 100%!

What makes it Polish? The owners are Polish/American.