Relish: Yogurtland better, cheaper than Swirll

By Dan Nelson     3/17/11 7:00pm

Sometimes corporations are cool. Like when they give you cheap things, especially when those cheap things are frozen yogurt. This week we trekked out to Yogurtland, a national frozen yogurt chain based out of Anaheim, Calif. Since California is pretty far from Rice we went to the branch located at Westheimer and Shepherd instead. For those of you who are geographically challenged, this is the same place where such Rice staples as Teahouse and that one Verizon store are located.

This week, we were planning on reviewing the dazzling food options on the Carnival cruise we were on during spring break, but after concluding that most of the food was effectively irrelevant and after a  couple days we were unable to eat due to seasickness, we ran over to get some froyo.

Hearing that Yogurtland offers frozen yogurt at a meager $0.33 an ounce, Siegfried immediately decided that Yogurtland appealed to his desire not to spend money on things.

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Unlike other froyo places and gastropubs, Yogurtland offers free sample cups as soon as you walk through the door. It's not like this is a secret, either. The guy working the register forced us to take 12 each. Considering we weren't expecting any kind of service or human interaction at a yogurt place, the friendly and helpful nature of the staff was a welcome surprise.

Yogurtland has a large selection of flavors. In addition to the standard flavors such as plain, strawberry, peanut butter and cheesecake, they offer red velvet cupcake batter, taro, guava pineapple tart and other more exotic flavors listed on their website. The frozen yogurt is high quality, comparable with Swirll or Berripop, but not quite up to the standard of Red Mango.

The toppings at Yogurtland are pretty standard, which is in no way a bad thing. All of the fruit was fresh and tasted like good versions of the fruit it was supposed to taste like, instead of like leather or feet or something. They also had cheesecake bites, which you could put as a topping on your cheesecake yogurt, if you're into redundancy. They also had vanilla wafers, and vanilla wafer flavored frozen yogurt and so on. Their toppings don't differ too much from the other frozen yogurt establishments, except that since the cost per ounce is so low you can put a ton of cheesecake bites on your devil's food cupcake batter froyo for less.

The major selling point of Yogurtland is the incredibly low price.  Even our roommate Jeremy, who regularly spends $10 or more at Swirll, thinks that Yogurtland is totally worth going to, especially with the girl's cross country team.

In conclusion, go to Yogurtland. If you've been to all the other places that we review, you're probably out of money anyway and everyone knows that the first step to becoming a Houston foodie is realizing there is more out there ?than Swirll.

Siegfried Bilstein and Dan Nelson are Wiess College seniors.

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