Consumed on 30 March 2014
Location - McDonald's Ice Cream Kiosk, BCS Mall, Batam, Indonesia
Price - 10500IDR = $0.90USD
Calories - ~350kcal
Since I haven't been able to do many overseas trips in the last couple of months, my wife and I made a weekend trip over to Batam Indonesia, mainly because it's close, and they only charge $10 for a tourist visa, unlike $25 for the rest of Indonesia. I've been to Jakarta a couple of times, but this was my wife's first visit to Indonesia. Since we only stayed a single night, we tried to fit as much food in as we could in our short two days. The plan was to grab McDonald's to see if they had any new promo items on offer, before heading back to the ferry terminal on our last night, because their website is rather lacking.
I found a McDonald's on Google Maps located at the "BCS Mall", and it wasn't far from where we were were, so we made the 20 minute walk over. Unfortunately, what Google Maps didn't tell me was that this wasn't actually a proper McDonald's, but a lonely ice cream Kiosk. We asked a security guard, and he said the nearest branch was at least a 30 minute walk further from where we were. We didn't have enough time, and didn't want to fight through the chaos of traffic/people eating potholes, and since I wasn't certain there was actually anything special being sold, we relegated ourselves to just try the ice cream.
I thought queues move slowly in Singapore, but this 12 person queue easily took 30 minutes. It seemed that everyone needed to order 3-10 cones/McFlurries each. It was just one single staff member, and the entire time we spent at that mall, the kiosk easily had a 5-15 people waiting, I seriously doubt he is earning enough for working that hard all day. The mall didn't have any public benches, or even a food court, so we found a place to sit outside on some steps.
The Wafer Black Forest McFlurry sounded interesting on the poster, but in actuality it was just a crushed wafer and fudge with sprinkling of Nescafe mixed into the McFlurry. Apart from the NesCafe, it sounds pretty boring to us, but I guess in Indonesia hot fudge isn't a regular menu topping for McFlurries, so this was considered a limited edition item. Can't complain for the price, at <$1 for a large McFlurry, it's nearly 4X cheaper than back home in Singapore
If I didn't see that Nescafe coffee was on the promotional poster, I would have never noticed that it was in this McFlurry, since there was so much chocolate fudge, I couldn't taste anything else. Every so often you would get a couple gritty chunks of Nescafe that hadn't mixed in properly with the ice cream, but you still couldn't taste it. To make it even worse, the pieces of cone were stale, and much chewier than I would have liked. This promotion had been running since the 1st of Jan, and it was to finish the next day, 31 March, and it tasted like these cones had been sitting out in the open since then.
Rating - 2/5
This reminded me of the mid-2013 Hong Kong promotional Black Forest Coke Crunch McFurry. That just sounds properly good.
When I was searching for that HK photo, I also saw that The Philippines also had a Black Forest Coke McFloat. The Cookie Butter McFurry also sounds amazing. I do need to make it back to PH soon.
