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So The Vegetarian has the benefit of working at a building whose parking lot acts as a rendezvous point for nearly all of the areas food trucks over the course of a given week. I have the inside scoop (pun intended, in this case) on all the crazy goods that come through and an excuse to have a nosh with my wife. Last week I got the bulletin that there was a truck present offering promises of a Bacon Maple milkshake. I saw a gap in my schedule and made a mad dash to her locale.

The fellows working the truck were very personable and excited that I was ordering their concoction. A brief conversation convinced me that they take their bacon very seriously. Even better. The shake was made from hand-scooped vanilla ice cream and real crumbled bacon. I missed the maple part of it but I’m assuming it was maple syrup – evidence to come later in this review. It was served in a stealthy and unassuming wax paper soda cup.

I was very excited. Real bacon in a shake. I’d had it in ice creams and custards before but not in a form intended to be consumed via straw. I really liked the Jack in the Box bacon shake but it was just flavored with syrup. This was the real deal Holyfield. How would it show? Read on!

My impressions: Not enough maple. It was in there but barely noticeable. It was clearly overwhelmed by the inherent vanilla. Also, it didn’t seem to blend very well. As I was taking pulls off the straw, I would get these occasional gelatinous blobs in the ice cream stream. My best guess was that it was dollops of syrup that didn’t get well mixed into the ice cream. Not a big deal. Some people may even like surprise maple bombs. For me it was less a taste issue than it was a texture issue. It threw me off. The consistency of the shake itself was great. Not too thick, not too runny but then… blobs. I dunno. Anyhow, next was the bacon. It was good quality bacon but, as I suspected, it was a bit of a straw clogging issue. It wasn’t chopped up fine enough. In fact, what came up the straw was just the little sprinkles and dust created by the cutting process. The real bits were far too big for any straw to handle. It made for a fantastic last lid-off chug mouthful of bacon and ice cream but that’s about it. I would rather have had a more linear bacon experience from start to finish, rather than a big last hurrah.

I wanted so bad for this to be my bacon shake mecca but in my opinion it just fell flat. A good concept with good ingredients but with flawed execution. Sorry guys. The search continues.