The Age of Luxury Ice Is Here

I LOVE ICE. LIKE, really, really love it. Once, I asked for ice in my rosé at a bistro in Paris and got a dirty look. One of the best things about my current apartment is not the washer/dryer or the dishwasher or the southern and western exposures or the proximity to Griffith Park, but the ice machine in the freezer compartment of my refrigerator. 

Other people really, really love ice as well. People who go to Sonic Drive-Ins, for one thing, where you can not only get awesome ice in your drink but also buy a bag of it to take home. (The closest Sonic to me is in Duarte, sadly.) Once, during a visit to the Westside home of the writer Roxane Gay, I was directed to a fancy ice machine on a kitchen countertop — a GE Opal that makes my favorite nugget (also known as “pellet”) ice. Sadly, I didn’t have the budget, or the counter space, to justify getting my own. 

Last year, I got a charge for ice on my restaurant bill. A guy I was “seeing” was in town from Paris and asked me to take him to an “American steakhouse.” I knew what he wanted but could not provide it: Musso & Frank was all booked up, as was Taylor’s. A friend suggested a place in Hollywood — it was new, and it was chic, the friend said, and they had a table for two at a reasonable hour on a Thursday night, so I booked it. I didn’t care about the “new” or the “chic,” but I loved that they had room for us. 

When the check came, I noticed something strange. My amaro, priced at $18 on the menu, was listed on the check as costing $22. When the server came over to retrieve the bill and get my credit card, I asked her about the $4 discrepancy.

“That was for the ice,” she said.

That was for the ice?! I don’t usually look over restaurant receipts, so maybe I’d been missing something that had been going on all along. I mean, what did I know? I don’t go to steakhouses very often, or cocktail bars, for that matter. Also, that ice cube was beautiful. It was big and it was square, and it did its job, which was to cool things down and look pretty, like a swimsuit model hosing off a vintage Mustang in a 1980s Whitesnake video. Except with sharper edges.

But still.

Anyway, I complained to the server, who talked to the manager, who told her that the ice should be taken off the bill and the amaro comped. (This was nice of them.) I was still in sticker shock, though, and for the next few months I’d tell anyone who would listen — friends, bartenders at other bars — that I got charged $4 for frozen water at a fancy Hollywood restaurant. 

About a month ago, I returned to the steakhouse to see what would happen if I ordered the same amaro and asked for it on the rocks. Would I get charged for ice? I did not: The price of the amaro was the price of the amaro. Then I reached out to the restaurant to get a comment on the previous charge and was told by a PR rep that the restaurant does not charge for ice and never has. “They charge for a larger pour, so sometimes that shows up on a check as martini, cocktail or rocks,” the rep wrote. “All are $3-$6. That could be where the misunderstanding regarding a charge for ice occurred.”

But by then, it was too late. I was down an ice rabbit hole.

A few months ago, I went to Vandell, a popular, relatively-new Los Feliz cocktail bar, to do a bit of recon and ended up talking to the bartender about how I’d been charged for ice.  The bartender told me that though Vandell does not charge for ice, the cocktail ice it uses comes from Japan and costs the restaurant 60 cents a cube. 

“From Japan?” I asked, dumbly.

The bartender smiled at me and nodded.

“Like, imported? From Japan?” 

He kept smiling. Then he reached under the bar and pulled out a plastic bag — more like a sleeve, I suppose — of perfectly-packed, perfectly-clear, 2-by-2-inch ice cubes.

“From Japan.” 

“Fancy,” as it turns out, doesn’t just mean “expensive.” In some cases, it means “from halfway around the world.”

It also means “bespoke,” says Amy Brady. Brady is the author of the 2023 book Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks — A Cool History of a Hot Commodity, and I’m talking to her via Zoom on a weekday in April. She seems wholly unsurprised about the fact that ice is being imported from Japan to the United States. Bespoke ice, like that used by bartenders at Vandell, is an outgrowth of serious cocktail culture, Brady explains, and it’s not just because of aesthetics. Bespoke ice is more dense, and being more dense means it’s colder and being colder means it melts slower than, say, the crescent-like pieces made by my GE Monogram refrigerator, which dilute drinks faster and are full of grit and other impurities. 

In fact, over the past 10-15 years, Brady said, bespoke ice has become a thing — apparently, there’s an entire culture of young ice creators on TikTok who record their ice-making experiments and practice their carving skills on camera — but you have to be into cocktails to be into ice. (The Japanese are really into their cocktails.)

Shape also makes a difference. (Depending on the drink, bars like Vandell use different sizes of cubes, as well as ice in shapes like spheres and rod-like sticks.)

I ask Brady if she’d pay for an ice cube.  “If it was a special occasion,” she says, adding, “to my palate, it does make a distinct difference.”

Naoto Yonezawa is an L.A.-based representative for Kuramoto Ice, a Japanese company that has been making bespoke ice since 1923 and is the supplier of ice for bars in cities like New York, Las Vegas, Seattle and of course, Los Angeles, where it serves more than 50 businesses, including Vandell, its biggest customer. 

Kuramoto makes four types of ice: Cubes, spheres, sticks and what is called Kachiwari, which is “randomly cracked shaped ice,” and the most popular type of ice in Japan. It can be found in Japanese convenience stores. (Japanese ice culture, Yonezawa says, is a “thing,” though he doesn’t use that word.) 

Cubes of Kuramoto ice are not made in individual molds but in large, 300-pound ice blocks that are then cut with a band saw into squares and/or other shapes. (Kuramoto has 20 different specifications to accommodate different sizes and shapes of glassware.)

Part of making bespoke ice is not just making the ice dense, but making the ice clear. This is achieved by using reverse-osmosis-filtered water and then freezing the ice at a higher temperature than that used by, say, a home freezer. Freezing the ice at a higher temperature, say, minus 10 degrees Celsius versus minus 18 to minus 20, means that it takes longer to freeze (about 72 hours), and in that slow freezing, minerals and air bubbles are pushed to the side while the pure H2O undergoes its chemical reaction to the cold and becomes a solid. 

Oh, and one other thing: That reverse-osmosis-filtered water? It’s also being circulated as it chills. The result is an enormous block of ice — Kuramoto makes between 700 and 1000 blocks a day — that has clear sections that are then cut out to make different shapes (say, 500 to 600 cubes per block), packaged, and then sold in places like the United States, which makes up one-third of the company’s export output. (The rest goes to Singapore and Australia.) 

Certainly this must be bad for the environment, I tell Yonezawa. I’m having visions of ice being flown to LAX  on All Nippon Airways flights from Tokyo, sort of like the way Ladurée macarons are flown from Paris, or Uovo pasta from Italy. It’s not that straightforward, says Yonezawa. He explains that Kuramoto ice comes to the United States by piggybacking on existing frozen export-import infrastructure — alongside, say, frozen tuna or salmon — meaning  it comes on ships, not planes. He tells me that shipping Kuramoto ice from Kanazawa, Japan, to the United States produces the same carbon footprint as shipping a single case of pinot noir to Orange County from a winery in Napa. 

It’s funny, when you think about it — the fact that Americans are importing ice from abroad — because it used to go the other way around. Back in the 1800s and 1900s, ice was being exported to other countries from the United States (including, says Yonezawa, to Japan). Ice has, in fact, been on the move since the early 1800s, when a wealthy man named Frederick Tudor launched the American ice trade after traveling to warm-weather places like Cuba and realizing he stood to make a lot of money by carving ice out of the lake on his New England estate and shipping it abroad — harvesting it, not manufacturing it. Then he did the same for places in the southern part of the United States, like New Orleans, where, says Brady, he “sparked a bona fide obsession” among bartenders and drinkers, and where cocktails were a distinctly American art. 

“I think you can divide American cocktail culture at the moment that [ice] started to really be used in cocktails,” Brady says. As she explains in her book, Ice, cocktails used to be served lukewarm, and most were rum-based. But ice, she says, “changed everything.” 

“Whether carved, cracked or shipped, it became the magic ingredient that transformed cocktails in the United States from after-work indulgences to works of art,” she writes. 

Consumers in the United States can’t buy Kuramoto ice in stores, at least not yet, says Yonezawa, because the company can’t control the quality of it once it hits store shelves, meaning, whether it melts or sticks together when it’s transferred from a freezer to a shopping bag to a hot car. So, for now, it is business to business only. (Many of those businesses are Japanese bars, which, he tells me, are considered their own category.)

Like Brady, Yonezawa says that ice makes an enormous difference in drinks. He likens the importance of ice in cocktails to that of rice or seaweed in sushi. It might not be the main event, but it’s important to the overall experience, including — especially! — the taste.

Shawn Lickliter, co-owner of Vandell, says something similar. He tells me that the type of water used in making ice can interact with spirits in potentially interesting — or unappealing — ways. Ice made from hard water, for example, might taste great with bourbon, but Japanese whisky might go better with ice made from soft water. (Kuramoto is made with soft water.) 

“The theory is texture,” he says. “For example, you can’t make sticky rice without soft water, and you can’t make paella without hard water.” Lickliter likes thinking of ice as a culinary tool in a mixologist’s toolkit.  “Somebody once said, ‘Ice is like a bartender’s fire,’” he adds. “It’s how you get cooking.”

A few days after I talk to Yonezawa, he comes by to make a special delivery of ice samples: a bag of cubes, a bag of Kachiwari, and another bag containing a few spheres and rods. He parks on the street outside my house, and I come downstairs, where he opens up the trunk of his Tesla to reveal a black freezer box full of Kuramoto ice. He takes a few bags out of the box and hands them to me; I feel like I’m the recipient of a cache of illegal drugs. 

I use up the Kachiwari pretty quickly (La Croix and Diet Coke), and a few days after the delivery, I ferry an insulated bag containing four 2-by-2  inch cubes to a friend’s house so that she and her husband (and her kids) can try them out. Later, my friend’s husband will text me a picture of a Negroni he made with one of the cubes. When I ask him if the Kuramoto 2-by-2 cube made a difference in his drink, he says that though it was a nice shape and the clarity was “cool,” he wasn’t sure he could taste the difference. “Maybe I don’t have good taste buds,” he says.

As for me, I have eight of the Kuramoto cubes left in my freezer, and I’m hoarding them like I used to hoard toilet paper back in the COVID days of 2020. Except that toilet paper was available for sale to the public (if difficult to find), and it’s pretty much a necessity, not a luxury. But frozen water, I’ve discovered, is a luxury that, once they’ve tried it, some people can’t forget.  Which is why I’m currently circling a sexy-looking GE Opal that makes pebble ice and is $80 off at Best Buy. 

Anna Holmes is a writer and editor and the author of the upcoming book “The Power of No,” to be published by Crown in September.