I'll come straight out and say it: that's a misleading title.
This dessert is on the menu as 'curry ice cream', but technically it isn't.
Ah, which menu though? The limited-time summer 2022 'curry fair' menu at yakitori (chicken on sticks) chain Torikizoku. Tandoori chicken, curry ramen, a few other spicy dishes, and this.
It's vanilla ice cream, topped with a maple syrup infused with curry spices. To be fair, 'curry ice cream' is more likely to grab your attention. 'Vanilla' is literally a codeword for 'safe, boring and predictable', so leading with the curry was the only way.
At a first glance, you wouldn't suspect a thing. It looks like your average izakaya dessert. (It looks so much like an average dessert that they tried to bring me a different one instead. That was akward.)
Putting the curry flavour in the maple syrup sauce, rather than the ice cream, was a clever choice to keep everyone happy. If you decide you're not a fan, you can just scrape the sauce to one side and stay vanilla.
The maple sweetness offsets the curry spices for a nice - if... confusing - overall flavour. You'll end up eating more than one mouthful, just to try and work out what on earth you're tasting. It reminded me of chai tea, which I like.
But: if you try to eat too much sauce by itself, the spice kick starts to get overpowering. The menu description calls it a 'slight/faint' (ほんのり, honnori) curry flavour, and I call that an understatement. I've never had that much of a spice tolerance (see: all my previous blog posts), so after a while the sauce got heavy.
In the same way people suggest drinking milk with spicy food, that plain vanilla ice cream balanced the sauce out really well for me. It doesn't try too hard, it's just reliable. It works, and we should all be glad about that because ending a good meal with a naff pudding is never a fun experience.
This is a different, divisive dessert. It's for the curious and the brave. Not everyone's going to enjoy spice in their ice (cream), and that's why this won't end up on the regular menu.
Verdict: 8/10. The kind of weirdly fun thing you should try if you have the chance.