The Starving Student: Dinner at Cibo and the Conclusion of the Village Icecream Hunt

As promised I'm ready to go with my review of Cibo (pronounced "chee-boh" I learned, not "see-boh")! My friend Shannon and I popped in for dinner last night and it was really good. And cheap too, the 2 of us ate for under $30 including tip!

We started with the almonds. They were lightly candied with hints of smoky paprika and a sprinkle of sea salt, a nice sweet/salty balance.

Then on to the pizza. I think I have eaten pizza like 3 times in the past week...yikes! More like yum actually. We tried the mushroom variety with taleggio cheese and thyme. Earthy but light (likely due to the absence of tomato sauce). The crust was crispy with a light char. No complaints here. Definitely a place I will visit again.

Clearly she is not thrilled to be having her picture taken but you can tell, she's definitely excited to dig into that pizza!

For dessert I finally managed to find Village Icecream, which just opened up shop recently. I guess I've yet to share my first failed attempt at finding the place. My mom and I went out for dinner the other evening (review still to come) and I suggested that we try Village for dessert. We drove down to the end of 10th Ave, came to a dead-end and stopped, trying to figure out if we were missing something - Village was nowhere in sight. I re-checked the address but to no avail. So when I got home I decided to call them and figure out what was going on. As it turns out, they are so new they had yet to put up any signage. Little did we know we drove right past it! This time I was determined to find it and get my icecream! And I did (it helped that their sign was finally painted). However it is a very odd location. I'm interested to see how their business does because it's not exactly a place that you would randomly stumble upon. Unless you know that it's there, it is highly unlikely that you would find yourself driving down that street.

This is the sign you are looking for!

Anyways, let's get to the icecream itself. Village basically specializes in what I would call "artisanal" icecream. They don't have very many flavours but the ones that they do have are done right. After tasting a few (including the feature lemon poppyseed muffin and their specialty, salted caramel) I opted for plain old vanilla. I know, I know, how boring could I be? But the thing is, it actually tasted like vanilla. Really that's harder to find than you would expect. It was very creamy, not icy in the slightest. Although very rich. There's definitely a lot of cream in that icecream...go figure. Which is why I often prefer gelato but regardless, it was good icecream. $5 for a single scoop good? That might be up for debate but it was still good. Either way, I'm just happy because I finally managed to find the place!