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This dessert café specialises in ice-cream cones cloaked in clouds of candy floss that are fiddly to hold – especially if you’re trying to immediately Instagram them like the hordes of tourists gathered here do. Like the similarly zany bubble tea idea, this cone-cept emerged in Taiwan and has made its way to central London. Customers – mostly young, mostly Taiwanese – were literally tripping over the step on my visit, such was their excitement.
To get on the Milk Train, queue up, choose your soft serve and topping then watch a skilled cotton-candy technician whirl a puff of the stuff around it all. My vanilla cone with salted caramel chips was fine, although I wasn’t sure what to do with that floss. Dunk it in? Crushed Oreo on hojicha (roasted green tea) ice cream was more interesting and more indulgent. Both were achingly sweet, but really it’s more about the aesthetics here; these cones look like something a unicorn might have deposited.
Although the setting is basic, the wise choose to stay inside to enjoy their ice cream; it’s a nightmare to carry and you get an awful lot of stares from passers-by thinking: What the eff are you eating? Still, you’d have to be fairly joyless not to get some sort of kick from a floss-draped cone.