Sweet XO Good Grief in Harajuku goes bananas with Instagenic “ice ceam on a banana” hybrid

If you've noticed drink stands in Japan serving more banana juice lately, it's not a coincidence. It seems that bananas are popular in 2020. For example, at the beginning of the year, review site Rurubu mentioned banana juice as the top trend of the year, followed by cheese tea and draft tea (tea served draft style from a pump). Business is brisk at the National Banana Research Institute, a shop specializing in domestic Japanese bananas, where banana juice is a popular menu item.

In the hot summer months, the cool way to enjoy bananas are in ice cream, as we've already seen with the ice cream version of Tokyo's famous souvenir cake Tokyo Banana.

Now, California-based sweets shop Sweet XO Good Grief has a version which gets full points for visual impact. Instead of serving banana ice cream in a cone or a cup as you might expect, they've found a way to put a nice big dollop of soft serve banana ice cream on top of a half unpeeled banana, creating a hybrid just begging to be posted to your Instagram account, especially since you'll find it in the trendy neighborhood of Takeshita Street in Harajuku.

If you're wondering how they did it, the secret is a cookie stick which holds everything in place. In an additional stroke of genius, they added a layer of crepe between the ice cream and the banana which not only catches the melting soft serve ice cream as it dribbles down, but also makes the crepe tastier as it soaks up the flavor of the banana ice cream in the process.

Incidentally, if you think you've heard the name Sweet XO Good Grief before, it was probably in the context of their most famous menu item: "poop" ice cream