Europe's Cafes Still Won't Bring You Ice This Summer — Woody Magazine

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Aug. 3, 2026 (Mon.)

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Europe's Cafes Still Won't Bring You Ice This Summer. In 1899, Britain Imported More of It Than Any Other Country on Earth.

The divide was never about supply. It was about the last mile.

The scene repeats itself in Paris, Rome, and Athens every July. You sit down after a morning on your feet, order something cold, and the glass arrives at room temperature. You ask for ice. Two cubes turn up. They are gone before the first swallow.

Americans have been filming this for several summers now. Isabel Tan, a New Yorker, told CNN that asking for extra ice got her two more cubes, so she eventually asked for a bucket, half as a joke. The restaurant in Italy brought her a small one.

The explanation everyone reaches for is taste. Europeans simply don't want ice. American refrigerators are roughly twice the size of British ones and often have a dispenser in the door; British ones almost never do. All of that is accurate. It also does not fit the timeline.

A complaint older than the refrigerator

Jonathan Rees, the historian who wrote Refrigeration Nation, dates the American problem of finding ice abroad to more than a century ago. By the late 1800s, he says, Americans were already hooked, and would ask Europeans for ice only to be bewildered when none arrived.

That is decades before household refrigeration. Freezer capacity cannot account for a complaint filed in 1890. Which leaves the more interesting question: was there ice in Europe to give?

Britain bought more ice than anyone

There was, and in quantities that make the modern cafe look absurd. The most careful accounting comes from a working paper published by the London School of Economics. In it, the economic historian Bodil Bjerkvik Blain reconstructs the Anglo-Norwegian ice trade from Norwegian museum archives, British customs ledgers, and the trade journal Cold Storage and Ice Traders Review. One of her footnotes carries this:

504,627 tons Ice sold by Norway to Britain in 1899. That same year, everywhere else on the planet combined sold Britain 515 tons.

By the turn of the century Norway was shipping out more than a million tons of ice a year, and better than half of it landed in Britain. Norwegian suppliers held over 99 percent of the British market for natural ice. Whatever was keeping ice out of British glasses, scarcity was not it.

The ice came from Norway rather than New England for a reason that fits on a chart. Kragero to London is 590 nautical miles; New York to London is 3,199. Ice melts across the Atlantic, and what melts is priced into what survives. American ice was the expensive kind.

It was desirable enough to be worth counterfeiting. In December 1864, a foreign entrepreneur bought Lake Oppegard outside Oslo and renamed it Wenham Lake. The name belonged to a Massachusetts pond, and in Britain it had come to mean the finest ice money could buy. Merchants then sold blocks cut from Oppegard in England as American ice. By 1868, The Times was reporting that the crystalline slabs on fishmongers' slabs and in the Wenham Lake Ice Company's own window were, in fact, all Norwegian.

Where all that ice went

London alone took 206,978 tons of Norwegian ice in 1901. So where did it go?

Blain's answer starts with fish. Grimsby's smacks began carrying ice to sea in 1858, which stretched the length of a voyage and the size of a catch, and remade the market for fresh fish in London. Butchers drew on the same imports, and so did brewers, confectioners, ice cream vendors, hospitals, and the railway vans hauling perishables inland. As Britain urbanized and wages climbed, an entire food economy was built on top of imported cold.

But the sentence in Blain's paper that actually explains the modern cafe is a quieter one.

The marked difference between the American and British trade was the absence of distribution of ice to private homes in Britain.

A Briton who wanted ice at home went to the fishmonger, the butcher, or the chemist to get it. Few merchants sold ice on its own; it came attached to some other trade.

Think of it as freight. The cargo clears the port. It reaches the warehouse, then the wholesaler. And then there is no van that turns onto the residential street. British ice stopped exactly there. The country was awash in it, and the one stretch of road that was never paved was the stretch running into the kitchen.

America paved that stretch

The man who paved it was a Boston merchant named Frederic Tudor. In 1806 he loaded pond ice from Massachusetts onto a ship bound for Martinique. There were no icehouses waiting at the other end, and the voyage lost money. He kept at it anyway — India, the Caribbean, the American South — until he was known as the Ice King.

What created the habit, though, was the ice he couldn't sell. Nobody knew what to do with the surplus, Rees explains, so Tudor started giving it away to American taverns. Drinkers got used to their drinks cold, and then came back and paid for it. He did not find a market. He manufactured one.

The next step was the one that mattered. The icebox moved indoors. Amy Brady, whose book Ice traces the commodity through American life, notes that advertisers pitched it the way they would later pitch a car or a television. Owning an icebox announced to the neighbors that you had arrived in the middle class. Boxes in kitchens justified delivery routes, and delivery routes sold more boxes.

In Britain that loop never closed. Blain attributes the slow spread of ice through English households to how few of them owned an icebox: with nowhere to keep it, ice bought was ice wasted. Waste discouraged buying, thin demand discouraged routes, and the absence of a route removed any reason to buy the box. The same circuit that compounded in America simply failed to catch in Britain.

Contemporaries noticed the gap. Brady turned up letters and essays from Charles Dickens, who came to the United States and recoiled at the heaps of ice piled in American glasses. To the rest of the world, she says, the American appetite for ice was a spectacle.

The trade died. The route didn't.

Natural ice did not last. A Times report from 1911, cited by Blain, put daily consumption at 2,000 tons against an artificial-ice capacity of 500. The shortfall came by sea — twenty vessels a day into the Port of London. What finished the business was not a better machine but the First World War. The North Sea closed and Norwegian shipments stopped. By 1920, Norway's ice exports had fallen to five percent of their 1910 level.

An industry can vanish and leave its roads behind. In America, the refrigerator and its automatic ice maker inherited the iceman's route whole. So did the machine down the hotel corridor, the ten-pound bag at the supermarket, and the host who assigns someone to bring ice before assigning anyone to bring food. In Britain, that slot was empty from the beginning, and nothing arrived to fill it.

What is happening at the counter

So the cafe in Rome is not out of ice. As CNN put it, there is no shortage in Europe; ice simply isn't the norm. The place has a freezer and very likely an ice machine. Tipping cubes into a customer's glass is just not the default motion. Ask, and ice comes — two or three pieces, enough to take the edge off the drink.

Which means the ice now stops a few inches short of the glass, in the same way it once stopped a few feet short of the kitchen door. The gap has narrowed by about a century and a hundred miles. It has not closed.

And a fair amount of what travelers file under national character turns out to have this shape. Not a preference anyone chose, but the residue of a road that was built or wasn't, long before anyone now living sat down to order a drink.

The Last Word

Britain had ice to spare. It bought more of the stuff than any country on earth and never carried it as far as the kitchen. A century later, its cafes bring you two cubes.

Habits do not follow the goods. They follow the route.

Sources

Source ↗ Bodil Bjerkvik Blain, 'Melting Markets: The Rise and Decline of the Anglo-Norwegian Ice Trade, 1850-1920', GEHN Working Paper No. 20/06, London School of Economics (2006)
Source ↗ CNN Travel, 'Why Americans can't chill out about ice-free European beverages' (2025)
Source ↗ Royal Museums Greenwich, 'The ice trade: a cold business'
Source ↗ London Canal Museum, 'The Ice Import Trade'
Robert David, 'The Demise of the Anglo-Norwegian Ice Trade', Business History, 37 (1995), pp. 52-69
Jonathan Rees, Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America, Johns Hopkins University Press
Amy Brady, Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks — A Cool History of a Hot Commodity, G.P. Putnam's Sons

Woody Magazine is edited and published by Woody. Claude AI is used as a tool in the editorial process, and all editorial judgment and final responsibility rest with the editorial desk. Readers are encouraged to verify independently.

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