Water, no ice please

The expression "Water, no ice" rings a bell for every desi in the states (not sure bout other western countries). In fact, there is a cool website bout desis in the bayarea named after it.
For the uninitiated, "water, no ice" is the way most desis specify what they would like to drink, when they are at a restaurant. This is because pretty much very restaurant in the US (regardless of cuisine) always serve ice old water with lots of ice in it and the default drink for quenching thirst is not water. So you are always (and usually very politely) greeted with a "What would you like to drink?" question after being seated at a restaurant. When I first landed here, I often found myself trying to quench my thirst by gulping down ice cold water and not succeeding, While I wondered why anyone in their right minds would want to drink super-cold water when it was already super-cold outside, the vision of me merrily drinking super-hot tea in my super-hot home town (relatively) of Pune would float before me and I realized there was probably some very good reason for this that I would eventually one day understand.
So I soon changed my tactics of always saying "water, no ice" to the "what would you like to drink?" to just plain "water", which of course resulted in me getting water with ice.
After 10 years in the US, I still haven't figured it out! On the other hand I have been sufficiently Americanized (or matured) to just ask for what I really want and to not care too much about conforming, to now revert back to "water, no ice" - without diffidence and without apologies! :-)