Knock-out takeout

One of the great rewards of childhood is the ability to frolic all day, never thinking more than three blinks of an eye into the future, then arriving in the kitchen around 7 p.m. to sit down to a home-cooked dinner. For adults, even those who love to cook, the prospect of coming up with a tasty, made-from-scratch meal every day of the workweek can be agony. In the time it usually takes me to come up with a super (or even sub-par) supper idea, I could have prepared a seven-course spread.

Imagining a place in that serves fresh, gourmet dinners on a made-to-go basis used to be what I considered a silly pipedream. I’d think of movies set in Chicago or San Francisco, where the characters would take advantage of the aforementioned specialty food services and think, “A city like Reno would never offer such a swanky convenience; that’s a service reserved for lawyers and doctors in Sausalito.”

But, now there’s Icebox.

At $10 a plate, meals at Icebox aren’t too expensive. The price might seem a tad high, but when you consider that you’re basically getting a home-cooked meal that’s more convenient than even fast food, the expense seems worth it. It doesn’t hurt that chef/owner Gino De Schryver goes shopping for fresh meats and produce daily.

At Icebox, you can order the day’s food up until 10 a.m. online at www.iceboxkitchen.com, where there are three weeks worth of menus on the Web site. You can order a little later if you do it over the phone. Walk-in orders are also available on a first-come-first-served basis. So it’s a good idea to be prescient when it comes to dinner plans.

I placed an order on a day where the meal was parmesan chicken pillard with green bean salad. I also couldn’t resist ordering the week’s desserts: flourless chocolate cake and carrot cake (each $4.50).

The green bean salad was a cold dish containing cooked green beans and marinated red peppers in spiced garlic oil. The peppers lent the dish a hint of sweetness, and the garlic was fairly mild until I realized I could still taste it when I was eating my carrot cake. Nonetheless, it was a good summer salad, out of the ordinary and refreshing.

The chicken seasoning was similar to Shake ‘N Bake, which is very tasty but undoubtedly has more preservatives than Icebox’s version. The chicken was an inch-thick piece of almost startlingly white meat.

Dessert at Icebox is where it’s at. The flourless chocolate cake has the appearance of a fluffy cake but is basically pudding once on the tongue. It embodies every part of the cliché “melts in your mouth.” The carrot cake is no less impressive. It has more healthful ingredients than any carrot cake I’ve ever had: zucchini, coconut, walnuts and some candied fruits I couldn’t quite distinguish. It was huge and so satisfying.

Icebox’s two locations are ideally situated. One is off of Baring Boulevard in Sparks; the other is in south Reno near International Game Technology. The folks from IGT alone could surely keep Icebox’s business going strong for years to come, so long as they take notice of this little treasure.