If you wanted to try every flavor of gelato available at La Grassa Gelato in Madeira, you could. Entertain no fear of being too picky or taking too long to decide on a flavor, as you might at other dessert shops. Proprietor John Berman wants you to find your favorite; in fact, he’s determined to help you do so.
“I can’t justify doing traditional advertising when my best advertising is for you to taste the product,” Berman says.
He and manager Josh Clayton pass out at least 10 tastes of gelato during my visit to the shop on a weekday afternoon. (They serve sorbettos, or Italian sorbet, too.) I observed a pair of friends come in and ask to try one of the gelatos, and cross my heart, she actually said, “That’s incredible. That’s better than Italy.”
Berman looked across the counter at me and smiled. After all, he trained in the art of gelato in Italy. La Grassa’s product origins can be traced to Gelato University, near Bologna, Italy, but the concept began in the basement of pizzeria/restaurant A Tavola, where the first batches of this creamy dairy treat were concocted for the restaurant’s dessert menu.
Berman wasn’t always a gelatier; he spent his career working in the family plastics manufacturing business, Berman Industries. His pragmatism and business acumen are attributes that served him well when he decided to make a foray into the food industry.
“I never wanted to be in the restaurant business or food business,” Berman says with a chuckle, “and I still try to convince myself that I’m not now; it’s a manufacturing business with a retail aspect.”
Indeed, that was the original plan for La Grassa. After traveling to Italy to scope out the gelato world, pick up some training and gelato equipment, the A Tavola folks approached Berman, a longtime friend of the restaurant’s founding family, to see if gelato could make a good grocery store retail product. He did some research and told them it probably wouldn’t — but it could make a great venture on its own. Berman has been making gelato for them since 2014; the shop, located in a converted historic home, opened in December 2017 — just down the street from A Tavola’s Madeira location.
Besides gelato, coffee is the other menu staple, with espresso, lattes, affogato, drip coffee, Chai, iced tea, lemonade and a few other beverages.
A reminder: gelato is not ice cream. It is similar, in that both creations are dairy treats. But where ice cream is comprised of mostly cream and a little bit of milk, gelato uses even less fat (from the cream) and more milk. Berman says the typical cream-to-milk ratio for ice cream to be called ice cream necessitates 35 to 40 percent cream, and the rest is milk. In fact, the FDA says ice cream can contain no less than 10 percent fat, whereas gelato typically only has 4 to 9 percent.
The reduced butterfat content of gelato means your taste buds aren’t coated by the fat, allowing the flavor to get all the way through and last to the final bite. La Grassa uses high-quality, local products to ensure the best possible flavor: Hartzler Family Dairy in Wooster, Ohio provides the milk, and the popular Snowville Creamery in Pomeroy, Ohio supplies the cream.
The other secret to gelato is balance.
“There’s a tremendous amount of science with gelato and sorbet,” Berman says. “The idea in quality gelato or ice cream is to eliminate ice crystals. The job of sugars in our product is to break down water molecules into their smallest form, so they don’t bunch up and create crystals, and we achieve that through balance… In gelato and sorbet manufacturing, balance is everything.”
On a recent Sunday evening, I sampled a small cup of the gianduja (chocolate and hazelnut) and my mom got a cup of the salted caramel. Ordinarily, I don’t like too much hazelnut. But this was fantastic; smooth, creamy and perfectly well-balanced. The salted caramel was so good it made me forget that I usually prefer to pair chocolate with caramel. I also had an affogato, featuring Intelligentsia espresso poured over a plain gelato base. The gelato base is just milk, cream and sugar, and so very good, I would order just a cup of that next time.
I like to consider myself a frozen dairy fanatic, if not aficionado, but of all the frozen confections out there, sorbet is my least favorite medium. I was intrigued by the more colorful sorbetto flavors La Grassa has available, though: mango, passion fruit, strawberry, blood orange, chocolate…wait. Chocolate sorbet? I tried it, and my tastebuds were blown away. It wasn’t icy and melty and SnoCone-like, as most sorbets I’ve had tend to be. It was smooth and creamy and tasted just like ice cream. Or gelato.
The blood orange was tart, creamy and just sweet enough. But I found the other fruit flavors too tart. Berman spends a lot of time re-calibrating his recipes (handwritten, with lots of crossed-out numbers) so it’s possible the strawberry might be more mellow the next time I try it. Also worth noting: None of the gelatos or sorbettos stay in the Pozzetti display case for more than two or three days, so you’re guaranteed a fresh scoop every time.
“For us, (it’s about) the simplest, plain, no toppings, no gimmicks, no booze, no rolling,” Berman says. “Because I’m using this expensive stuff, I want you to get the full taste.”
That kind of simple, replicable business model means La Grassa is ripe for export as a retail front to other cities. We discussed the potential saturation point of frozen dairy treats in Cincinnati, but Berman doesn’t see the other local dairy players as competition. A high tide raises all ships is his loose motto, and the plan is to try to grow in town before expanding elsewhere.
“We can coexist,” he says. “There’s Rhinegeist and MadTree, there’s Goldstar and Skyline; to me, it’s not a competition.”
Lucky for us.
La Grassa Gelato is located at 7014 Miami Ave., Madeira. More info: lagrassa.com.
This article appears in Jul 25 – Aug 1, 2018.
