Life shavings

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/07/2020 (2124 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Frozen hands up if you remember the Frosty Sno-Man Sno-cone machine, created by the Hasbro toy company in the 1960s.

The cavity-inducing contraption worked like this: while depositing cubes of ice in Frosty’s hollowed-out, plastic noggin you would turn a crank that rendered the ice into slivers via a cheese grater-type device attached to the mechanism’s mid-section. Once there was enough shredded ice to fill a small cup, you’d then squirt a provided artificial sweetener — flavours included orange, grape, pineapple, blueberry and pink lemonade — over top of the ice, producing a chilled treat perfect for a hot summer day.

OK, maybe not so perfect.

A few years ago Tina Dixon, founder of Island Girl Shave Ice, a family-run enterprise that bills itself as the city’s first authentic, Hawaiian-style shave ice biz, was a registered vendor at ManyFest, an annual street festival held in downtown Winnipeg’s Memorial Park. (According to the ManyFest website, this year’s festival remains tentatively scheduled for Sept. 11 to 13.) During the course of the weekend Dixon and her husband Darryl heard it time and time again; people strolling past their booth, made to resemble a tropical oasis with its Tiki thatch umbrella, would give the set-up the once-over then mutter under their breath, “Oh never mind, that’s just a junky snow cone.”

“It almost got to the point where I wanted to stand in front of my booth yelling, ‘We are not a snow cone!’” says Dixon, whose home-made syrups contain no preservatives, are gluten-, dairy- and soy-free and are naturally sweetened with organic cane sugar. “Instead, I started inviting passers-by to give my stuff a try for free. After doing so, quite a few ended up throwing away the ice cream or whatever else they’d bought already. So if you’re asking me whether they liked it or not, I guess that’s your answer.”

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Dixon, who is also a real estate agent, has a stock reply whenever people openly wonder if her business name implies she’s originally from Hawaii. No, the Sisler High School alumnus tells them, usually adding with a laugh that if she was from the Aloha State, there wouldn’t have been a snowball’s chance in hell of her leaving there for here.

That said, the story of Island Girl Shave Ice does begin on the island of Oahu, where the Dixons travelled for their honeymoon in 2001. Shave ice is ubiquitous in Hawaii — there are “oodles and oodles” of roadside stands selling the treat, she says — but because she initially mistook the product for an Icee or Slush Puppy (she’s never been a fan of either), she was initially hesitant to order one for herself. (When asked why it’s called shave ice and not shaved ice, which would seem to make more sense grammatically, Dixon says she’s been led to believe it’s because there is no D in the Hawaiian alphabet.)

“But as I kept seeing lineup after lineup for this stuff, finally one afternoon I told my husband we should probably stop and have one. I can’t remember exactly what flavour I ordered — I want to say mango — but I do remember being absolutely blown away by how good and refreshing it was.”

A number of years later the couple was back in Hawaii, this time as parents of two, a boy and a girl. One day while the four of them were frolicking on the beach, she spotted a shave ice stand nearby. Promising her kids they were in for a treat, she purchased shave ice for the lot of them. Only this time it wasn’t so satisfying, she says.

“The ice wasn’t shaved, it came in chunks, which meant the syrup didn’t get absorbed at all. It just pooled at the bottom of the cup,” she explains. “I thought to myself, jeez, even I could have done a better job. That’s when a lightbulb kind of went off in my head and I started thinking I should try making authentic shave ice back home. And because I’m the type of person who, when I make up my mind to do something, I go totally all in, that’s precisely what I did.”

Dixon, whose only previous food-related job was flipping burgers at Wendy’s at the age of 16, spent close to three years perfecting recipes by testing flavours such as piña colada, passion fruit and root beer on her always-keen-to-help-out kids, as well as deciding which commercial ice shaving machine was most to her liking. Island Girl Shave Ice made its debut in April 2016 at a dinner-and-dance at the RBC Convention Centre. The stand operated a bit like a bar, and interested parties would approach the booth in pairs, later pointing back at it when others in the room began inquiring where they got their rainbow-coloured confection from.

It didn’t take long, just a few months, until Dixon was being booked for every type of event under the sun, from birthday parties to bar mitzvahs to school track meets to backyard luaus. A humourous sort, she even came up with flavour combinations based on characters from the TV series The Walking Dead — the “Grimes,” for example, consisted of coconut, blue raspberry and cherry — when she was a registered vendor at a downtown horror convention in 2017. (Because the blocks of ice she uses weigh approximately five kilograms each, and because she’ll often go through as many as 20 blocks in the space of a few hours, she has a strict “no stairs” rule when it comes to venues.)

Looking forward to her fifth summer in business, Dixon was participating in an RV show and sale at the convention centre in mid-March when word began to spread that the affair, scheduled for four days, might not make it through the weekend owing to COVID-19. The first night, which coincided with the National Hockey League’s March 12 announcement that the 2019-20 season was being temporarily suspended, was “ridiculously slow,” she says. By 5 p.m. the next day, not only had she been informed the RV show was indeed being cancelled, she’d also begun losing bookings at an alarming rate as clients began postponing wedding celebrations and the like.

“In February I was like why’s everybody so worried about this virus but a few weeks later, boom, I took an absolutely huge hit,” she says. “I’m often booked months, sometimes a year ahead, and even though a few of the things that were supposed to be a go in May and June are now set for the fall, I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen just yet.”

While continuing to fill the odd catering order, Dixon, who has peddled her wares as far west as Portage la Prairie and as far east as Kenora, used her break from the business to streamline her menu, which at one point was up to 23 different varieties of shave ice. She also spent a fair amount of time replying to emails from those who enjoy her product, some of whom suggested she park her booth at the end of her West St. Paul driveway and operate a bit like an old-fashioned lemonade stand.

“I think my son Dylan was more upset about all the lost business than I was,” she continues. “He just started working for me last year and, in his head, had probably already spent the money he was expecting to make this summer.”

Also, if you’re thinking what we’re thinking, yes, from time to time Dixon does use her ice shaving apparatus to produce something with a little more… oomph.

“One time we were hosting a wind-up for my son’s baseball team at our place. For the kids we did the usual shave ice but for the adults we made a big batch substituting coconut rum instead. Let’s just say we were pretty popular with the other parents that weekend.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca