Holiday Shake Taste #3: Arctic Circle Egg Nog Shake

There has been some crowd noise about the avoidance of egg nog thus far in the shake tasting, so I headed on over to Arctic Circle to taste one of the two holiday shake offerings and I opted for egg nog over candy cane for the sake of this blog. For those of you not familiar with Arctic Circle, it is a regional fast food franchise that started in Salt Lake City sixty years ago.  They have a halfway decent Halibut sandwich which has opened up the options for a quick cheap meal when traveling with (still) vegetarian Gabe. Arctic Circle also lays claim to inventing fry sauce (Google it folks) that is like some sort of Utah crack cocaine sauce that one dips fries into. They also have "Brown Toppers," which is an awfully bad name for a dipped cone.  And on a recent trip I discovered that you can get a courtesy ice cream cone (perfect bite-sized) if you order a meal and eat in the restaurant. Unfortunately the reason for this discovery was that a nursing home was having a lunch outing in the restaurant that day. I had to weave my way around a bunch of parked walkers to place my order. All of the above except the last are great reasons to stop by Arctic Circle.                                                             

Ok, back to the holiday shake.  Arctic Circle has what they call, "above the rim" shakes, meaning that their shakes are thick enough to hang out above the rim of the cup. There are a lot of shake flavors to choose from and an ever rotating seasonal line up, usually involving fruit. They pride themselves on using fresh ingredients but their ice cream comes out of a machine so I'm not sure how real the ice cream is. Shakes are made to order and mixed with a milk shake mixer. A small vanilla shake (10 oz) has 270 calories and I'm sure that the egg nog added at least a few more. The shake definitely tasted like egg nog, but not overwhelmingly so. That is until I got to the bottom and there was a pocket of egg nog that had not been totally mixed in. I'm not sure the small bit of whipped cream really added much to the taste or the presentation of the shake. 

Shake color: pale yellow
Shake consistency: thick, smooth, and also very cold

Final Impression: This shake tasted better than I was thinking it would. I am not sure that I would order another egg nog shake, but I would get another shake from Arctic Circle.