Why Fried Ice Cream Is Associated With Mexican Restaurants

It sounds impossible, doesn't it? How on earth do you deep fry ice cream, a dessert that will melt into a puddle of sweet milk if you leave it out in the sun for too long? Well, not only is it possible, but it's absolutely delicious, too — a mix of sweet, creamy, and toasty. Like all fried foods, fried ice cream is a staple of state fairs, but, curiously, it's also a mainstay of Mexican restaurants. Why is that? While it's not exactly a recipe handed down from abuela to abuela for generations, fried ice cream has a long history in Mexican restaurants. And this is thanks in large part to Chi-Chi's.

Yes, that brand of salsa you see on the supermarket shelves was once a restaurant chain (although as restaurant chains turned salsas go, we prefer On the Border, which makes our favorite red salsa). While it's since moseyed off to the great Tex-Mex ranch in the sky, with its last location (in Vienna, Austria) closing in 2024, Chi-Chi's left its mark on the culinary scene by featuring deep-fried ice cream on its menu. As we said, fried ice cream isn't actually Mexican, so Chi-Chi's may have just decided it was an interesting, unusual choice of dessert at the time — this was the 1970s, after all. Once it became popular, other restaurants adopted the dish, too.

So, we now know why we see fried ice cream grace the tables of Mexican restaurants across the country — but where did the dessert itself come from? There are a couple of different theories. One holds that the recipe originated in Philadelphia in 1894, becoming a genuine food trend back in the days where it was much harder to go viral. Another idea suggests that fried ice cream made its debut at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. In this case, it would be in good company; cotton candy, a treat invented by a dentist, was also popularized at a World's Fair.

Fried ice cream was far from the first cooked ice cream dessert, however. Baked Alaska may have fallen out of favor in recent years, but the cake-and-ice-cream concoction was kind of fried ice cream before fried ice cream — and Thomas Jefferson was reported to have eaten it as early as 1802. This wasn't just an American innovation either, as a Japanese dish called "tempura aisu" may have also influenced the recipe. Wherever it came from, though, we're grateful it's around — even if there aren't so many Chi-Chi's anymore.