Dear Santa...

When I went to Pinkberry last night I felt like a child who didn't quite get what they wished for for Christmas. It's as if I asked for an all-singing, all-dancing battery operated doll and received a "true to life" plastic doll instead. Still a nice present, but not quite the indulgence I was looking for.

Pinkberry has nice wrapping, as I suspected. The store is lit with what look to me like Le Klint pendant lamps, and, as I mentioned before, there are Philip Starck ghost chairs which lend an air of regality. Slightly incongruous were the Alessi kitchen gadgets lined on shelves, although they may have been for sale. I didn't inquire.

The interior design and the quality of the ingredients (fresh, not frozen, fruit and a good choice of other sugary toppings) were betrayed by the presentation of the toppings and the finished product. The fruit is kept in small sunken storage bins just as it might be at a sub sandwich chain. My cup definitely did not look like the perfectly coiffed swirl on the website. As you can see, the fresh, firm berries were jammed on top of the yogurt and had none of the artful placement that was advertised.

But more importantly, how does it taste? Well, it tastes healthy. It has the sourness of a more acidic yogurt and is lacking the creaminess of unctuous Greek yogurt because, well, it's non-fat. The cookies-and-cream and raspberry toppings I had were a perfect crunchy and fresh antidote to the sweet-tart frozen yogurt. Although there seemed to be an equal distribution of consumers of the plain and green tea flavours, we tried the green tea and weren't terribly impressed; it had a loud green tea after taste but was very watery at first.

As my companion said, "it's not as good as ice cream," but the comparison is probably unfair. I wasn't expecting ice cream, but I was expecting something better than other frozen yogurts I've tried in the past, and this just wasn't it. Yogen Fruz is still top of the list. Now they just need to open one in NYC.