A fishy ice cream Sundae
Mangalore’s Gadbad is a unique regional dish that you best enjoy in its city of origin
To those who reside in Mangalore or are otherwise familiar with the city, Gadbad means something cold and an ice cream and not something fishy! This ice-cream sundae with a fishy name may have originated in an ice cream parlor in Mangalore about four decades ago in the 1970s when the Ideal ice cream parlor may have introduced it. Gadibidi in Kannada means confusion, and the famous Gadbad ice cream likely got its name from the confusion of rustling up ice cream with limited ingredients.
There are conflicting claims about the inventor and originator of the Gadbad Sundae, with seemingly equal votes in favor of Ideal of Mangalore and the Diana of restaurant Udipi. The two versions of Diana’s Gadbad are both equally hilarious and, whether true or not, add to the mystique and charm of the Gadbad ice cream.
According to the first story, an enterprising Diana restaurant cook whipped up a sumptuous bowl of ice cream with nuts, fruits, jelly, and syrup to calm an angry customer who felt the eatery had served him insufficiently quantity for his ice cream order. That ice cream concoction placated the customer, who was very happy consuming it, after which Diana’s management listed it as a menu item.
The second story is even more interesting. One day when Diana’s founder, Mr. Mohandas Pai, had to serve ice cream to a large group, he found that he had run out of different flavors but had small quantities of each. So he mixed and served the ice cream flavors he had in bowls and garnished them with fruits, nuts, syrup, and jelly, which the customers liked very much, leading to the birth of new ice cream.
Letting the debate about its origins broil on, let us delve into the Gadbad that Ideal dishes out and has made Ideal synonymous with Gadbad.
The Gadbad Sundae is not very different in content from sundaes anywhere else, but for the style of presentation and perhaps the word-of-mouth popularity, the ice cream has spawned for itself in the real world and the cyber world.
Gadbad is a Sundae with three different ice-cream flavors interspersed with layers of jelly, freshly cut fruits (mostly seasonal), syrup, and dry fruits. I have eaten Gadbad at different places in the Mangalore region over the past three decades (mostly at Ideal, though for obvious reasons) and outside of it too. Still, no other Gadbad has come close to what Ideal serves up.
There are, of course, many other claimants to the title of the best Gadbad maker, and considering we are debating about an ice cream that has no secrets in its recipe, the field is wide open to those that want to imitate Ideal’s Gadbad.
The Ideal ice cream parlor at Hampanakatta that originally served it and even now serves Gadbad has remained the same over the decades. However, the latest version is a fancy air-conditioned restaurant with smartly dressed waiters and waitresses.
Ideal’s management has vastly improved the ambiance of their restaurant at Hampankatta and now serves Gadbad and its ilk, a range of more than one hundred ice cream flavors! However, I think the presentation style and confidence in their product make the Ideal Gadbad the Ideal of its kind.
Apart from the ice cream, which is creamy and yummy, the goblet’s Ideal use is long and makes the sundae visible and attractive to the customer. The Ideal’s most creative idea is the long spoon to scoop out the sundae from the bottom of the long goblet.
There are different versions of how to go about decimating the Gadbad once it gets to your table. The purists prefer spooning out and eating each layer as it comes. You must do it fast, though, as the goblet groans with one scoop right at the top, ready to fall off if you are not quick enough to consume it!
The other school of thought seems to be that the name and the content of the ice cream make it fair game to mix up the contents and then sit back and enjoy whatever comes in each scoop, with there being six different types of ice cream or toppings likely to end up in your mouth! So the mixed-up ice cream Sundae with no order and predictability in each spoonful is what probably gave the name Gadbad to the three ice cream Sundae!
Whatever be your style of eating a Fishy Sundae, do head to Ideal for a great Sundae! Every visit to Mangalore must wrap in a Gadbad to be complete! On my last visit to Mangalore, my cousin Dr. Manjunath Kamath ordered an Ideal Gadbad ice cream for me through Swiggy. The Gadbad that Swiggy delivered was the same as you get at an Ideal restaurant, but the charm of the long goblet and the visual appeal of looking at the ice cream through the glass was missing.
In Mumbai, some of the Udipi restaurants run by people from Mangalore do serve Gadbad ice cream, but it is very different from and not as appealing as the Mangalore one.
Though the Mangalore ice cream parlor Gadbad is what most people would prefer, food blogs have elaborate menus on making the original Gadbad or your version of it. Here is the Foodies Terminal blog on Gadbad that lets you into the dish’s history and recipes to make it at home.
The popular Hebbar’s Kitchen blog also has the recipe for Mangalore’s famous Gadbad ice cream. Home-made Gadbad allows for experimentation and innovation through the Gadbad sundae’s main ingredients: multiple ice cream flavors.
For better appeal, the scoops of different ice cream flavors in a Gadbad sundae must be the same size and fit into the serving glass. Lastly, a Gadbad sundae tastes better when fresh, and hence ordering it from food delivery won’t give you a product like the one at an Ideal ice cream parlor.