I am not surprised to see the massive, growing popularity of roll ice cream all around Japan. Essentially, it is an ice cream dessert made by super-cooling creamy dairy products over a pan and scraping them off into little rolls. Top off with additional sweet toppings and you have roll ice cream. Simple, very cold, and delicious…

Roll Ice Cream Factory is a growing chain serving these desserts, but the reason we stopped this time was for their new Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun (Jibaku Shonen Hanako-kun) collaboration ice cream and tapioca boba drinks. These treats are patterned after different characters and it actually started on the day we went! Though, unfortunately due to shipping and production issues, the mascot characters shown on the menu were unavailable. Well, we ordered them anyway.

We opted for one roll ice cream of each collab flavor, @lavioli with the Kou Vanilla x Mango, @83castellas with the Hanako-kun Strawberry, and I chose the Nene Chocolate Mint at 900￥ ($8 USD) each. As expected of such a simple treat, they were all sweet and creamy, though I think the mango had the most prominent flavor of the bunch.

We also ordered some tapioca drinks which have really started growing in popularity everywhere <l>. Unfortunately, RICF is known for their ice cream and not their tapioca… the 800￥ drinks were too milky and not flavored enough and the regular black tapioca had no flavor and merely average texture. My strawberry bits and tapioca were a bit better, but a bit too sweet. These drinks are strongly not recommended; I would’ve gladly eaten another ice cream instead.

As part of the collab, we received a coaster with each item order though we got stuck with 3 of Tsukasa... too bad we couldn’t get an even collection of all the featured characters between us three!