Professional Foray #14: DC does gelato, and how: Dolcezza, Dupont Circle

DC does a few things right.  Museums.  Air quality.  Indian food, namely at Rasika, where I had quite possibly the best Indian meal I've ever had.  Chinese food, humor and politics are not its strengths.

Gelato, it turns out, is.  Dolcezza, of which there are three locations in the DC area, is some of the finest gelato I've tasted in America, on a par with Grom or Cones.  The location near Dupont is clean, mostly white, intimate and rustic, like the sophisticated little cafes that dot the historical town centers of the wealthy cities in northern Italy.  It's owned by an Argentine woman, Violetta Edelman, and her husband Rob Duncan, who source everything from local farmers.  You can read their Michael Pollan-esque odes to their farmer friends on their website.  Almost everyone gets described as "some of the nicest folks we know."

Irrespective of how kind the farmers are, and how much Violetta and Rob adore them, this is some spanking good gelato.  My friend Liz and I had the ginger cardamom pistachio, the pumpkin spice (with nutmet, allspice, clove, cinnamon and ginger), and the chocolate with ancho, chipotle and cinnamon.  The pistachio flavor was particularly unique, reminiscent of mann w' salwa, a cardamom-pistachio flavor I'd heretofore only eaten in the Middle East, where that combination is used often in nougat candies.  As in most cases, the addition of ginger made it even more delicious.  The pumpkin flavor features locally-grown Crookneck pumpkins, a sweet variety of squash they bake with spices before folding it into cream sourced from a Pennsylvania dairy.

I'm nearing my wit's end with the preciousness of local this and small farmer that (even though I prefer to shop, eat and generally live that way, I'm tired of talking and reading about it all the time), so I won't dwell further on how great all of these efforts are.  The important thing is taste, and this gelato tastes wonderful.  It's creamy and light on the tongue, goes down easy, and you don't need to drink a lot of water while you eat it, which is how you know if it's too rich or heavy.  I was able to go to dinner a half-hour later, and eat another giant Indian meal.  And if Dolcezza wasn't closed by the time we finished, I would have had another cone.  Dolcezza, 1705 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC, 202 299 9116, www.dolcezzagelato.com

Professional Foray #8, Mia Dona gelato cart, East Midtown, NY

After reading about the cart a few weeks ago on Daily Candy, I've been looking for an afternoon window in which to go check out Mia Dona's ice cream cart.  According to this posting on the Midtown Lunch blog, Dona is serving "the best takeaway dessert in the area."  And Serious Eats NY's Kathy Chan liked it well enough.

Credit: Kathy Chan

Kathy wrote that, seeing her torn between the two flavors, honey-ricotta and pistachio, the obliging man working the cart was kind enough to offer her two flavors in her brioche.  This is the least he could do, seeing as each sandwich is $6.  When my friend Maisie and I sidled up to the shop, at quarter of 7 p.m., the cart was already parked in the back of the restaurant by the toilets, and we had to order from the manager.  He wasn't familiar with the two-scoop, bulging brioche policy, and gave us each a stale, toasted brioche schmeared with a thin layer of our respective choices.  I've eaten bagels buttered more generously than this brioche.

When I cut each one in half so Maisie and I could try each others', it barely squished out of the sides.  This was a far cry from the oozing, bulging, lick-it-before-it-drips-down-your-hand glory of La Sorbetteria in Bologna (more to come on that soon), where Maisie and I first bonded as juniors studying abroad.  Not a promising start.

The gelato, as you may be able to tell from the picture, is rather icy.  The flavors are decent, sweet and clear (as you may know from reading this blog, I'm not entirely averse to iciness in an ice cream or gelato, but in this case it felt stingy and compromising), but nothing special.  The honey drizzled on top of the ricotta was a nice touch, but the brioche was well past its prime, and didn't soak up the ice cream in the way that makes a brioche ice cream sandwich such a win-win proposition.

When the manager came out and saw eight shards of half-eaten brioche on our plates, he solicited our opinions.  We shrugged and politely mumbled some sentence fragments.  "A little icy."  "Brioche kind of stale."  "Usually there's more."  He very kindly offered them on the house, acknowledging that we hadn't truly enjoyed them, and therefore shouldn't have to pay for them.  He also predicted that Friday, yesterday, would be the cart's final day, so let this post serve as a eulogy. $6, Mia Dona, 206 East 58th St, 212-750-8170, www.miadona.com

Professional Foray #6, Lily Lolly, Bryant Park/Soho

In all honesty, I was favorably disposed towards these ice cream popsicles before I even tasted them.  Have a look at the Lily Lolly website, and tell me you don't feel the same.

Lily Lolly is a 1920s flapper character created by Nadia Roden, artist, illustrator, and ice cream perfectionist.  She's also the daughter of Claudia Roden, one of the world's experts on Mediterranean food.

Nadia wrote the first-ever book on granita, Granita Magic, but when she decided to start her own food business, she chose to vend creamy popsicles instead, reasoning that she "could be extra creative with lollies," and "do things you can't do in a cup," like roll a white-chocolate-dipped orange cream lolly in finely grated citrus zest mixed with crystalline sugar.

Monday evening found Nadia, her nephew Cesar, and her stepmother Peggy all sporting matching black-and-white aprons (Cesar looked especially fetching in his), selling popsicles to the curious cinemaphiles there to see a screening of the Goodbye Girl.  It was hot, sticky and humid, and despite a competing Time Warner-sponsored ice cream truck (and a Ben and Jerry's kiosk on the corner of 42nd and 6th), Nadia was doing a brisk business.

The family + me (Nadia's got her arm around me)

Not only that, but in the few hours I spent hanging around and watching her ply her trade, at least a half-dozen people (women, all) turned up specifically to buy a lolly (or three), then dashed off before the film even started.  One group of young women, who had at least two apiece, then announced they were off to dinner, which cracked Peggy up.

At least two pops each.  Good on you, ladies!

 Why the fuss, the serial buying, the devoted followers?  Nadia is a perfectionist: she tinkers with each recipe til she's got it down pat, and takes extra care in using the best ingredients and making sure each recipe is as flavorful as possible.  I've had ice cream that stresses how local and organic it is, but somehow the part about flavor/deliciousness gets lost in the mix.  Nadia's pistachio rose, for example, my first of three, tasted just like a Lebanese milk pudding, creamy and fragrant with rosewater, chock full of finely chopped Bazzini pistachios.  Having just returned from Beirut, I felt I was back in Lebanon again, at the end of a long mezze meal, stuffing myself with a few bites of muhallibiyah before passing out.

As the evening wore on, I met a number of charming, interesting people, all drawn into Nadia's polka-dotted orbit.  This lovely woman below, Roxandra Antoniadis, is an art consultant and soon-to-be memoirist, based between New York and Ohio (how often are people based between New York and Ohio?).  She was thrilled with her 50s Orange Lolly, and nearly fainted when I mentioned that Nadia is Claudia Roden's daughter. 

I also met Pam, a daytime bartender whose best friend from college owns the family farm in San Diego where Nadia gets the oranges for her lollies.  She also nearly fainted when she realized the coincidence. 

My next lolly was the Fresh Mint flavor, which Nadia makes by steeping fresh mint leaves in the cream and milk.  This one was truly exceptional: the mint was so fresh, and so intense, and the texture so light (she says she uses three parts milk to one part cream), that it felt like a small explosion of mint went off in my mouth, its mushroom cloud dissipating and leaving behind chocolate chip detritus in its wake.  I wouldn't normally use the word "symphonic" in an ice cream review, but here it seems worth the pretention. 

Nadia sent me off with one of her classics, the 50s Orange Lolly.  I was skeptical when I heard her describing it as having a sour cream base, because sour cream reminds me of bad Mexican food, or something delicious such as rice pudding that got left out of the fridge too long and turned gross.  This, however, was barely sour.  It was a creamy, luscious ice cream base whose mild sourness accented the delicate, refined taste of the Valencia oranges that she specially orders from California.  It was dipped in white chocolate, and then decorated beautifully with a dusting of superfine zest and sugar.  To her tremendous credit, after three ice lollies in a row, I still went home hungry for dinner.