Raspberry Ripple is the cult classic, selling more than all other flavours combined, but if you visit on a Coffee & Cookies day, you’ve hit the jackpot. Created entirely from scratch – right down to the ripples and cakey chunks – the ice creams vary daily, depending on the best natural local ingredients to be found. Now transformed into the small-batch ice-cream parlour Two Islands, its owners Laura Reynolds and Jack Pollitt make ice cream so delicious it makes grown men and women want to cry. There’s good reason the queue in the beach village of Abersoch in north Wales snakes to the door of the old bank. The ice cream is created entirely from scratch, even down to the ripples Locals are lured by the wafting scent of waffle cones – they make 800 a day – and the tantalising flavours, from Carrot Cake to Yogurt Rhubarb Crumble. Although the duo no longer do ice-cream sandwiches, they offer a scoop on their chewy homemade cookies. Jones gained a cult following for her decadent ice-cream sandwiches after moving here from Paris in 2013 today, she and her partner, Jan Diekmann, have a permanent location in the Schöneberg neighbourhood. Some of Berlin’s most innovative culinary entrepreneurs began their restaurants in food trucks, and that includes Gabrielle Jones, founder of the city’s beloved Jones Ice Cream. Jones Ice Cream makes 800 waffle cones a day They’re purists here and don’t offer it willingly, but the holy grail is a scoop of pistachio with vanilla soft serve on top.
Everything that goes into the elaborate sundaes is made on-site with fresh ingredients, and no artificial colouring or flavouring. There are now Morelli parlours everywhere from Baghdad to the Philippines, but the family-run mothership on the Kent coast dates back to 1932 – a glorious deco throwback of Formica and pink leatherette booths, with a jukebox and soda fountain. And then there are the three kings I’d travel the length of the peninsula to get a taste of: fior di latte with fresh mint, rosewater, and lavender. It’s a tiny hole-in-the-wall on the piazza of the same name, but it makes up for its unassuming dimensions with a selection of organic, hand-made gelati that run the gamut from the standards (pistachio, hazelnut, coffee) to some creative riffs, like an almond milk-based confection with camomile.
It’s a flavour that reminds people of the hardships of eating pine needles when food was scarce: as an ice cream it’s delicious, with a resiny hint of forest after rain. (They even have a tradition where people from all over the country come to watch cows released into the fields after winter.) Jymy’s flavours are Nordic classics: liquorice, lingonberry jam and pine – the last created in 2017 to mark the centenary of Finland’s independence from the Russians. Horst Neumann of Jymy tells me this is due to a culture of private indulgence and because Finns like to celebrate their excellent dairy. I felt that complimenting Assenza on the food would be like thanking Verdi for the tune, so I asked instead about the view of the street.Despite its subarctic climate, Finland is one of the world’s highest consumers of ice cream per capita. I had – as you do, as you must – granita and brioche and coffee. We sat at a table outside in the morning sun. Corrado Assenza is a spry, intense fifty-something with a high, intelligent forehead, a rakish white beard and the eyes of a revolutionary. I had breakfast with the man himself during a recent visit. The simplicity and straight-forwardness and elegance of that menu is, for me, an image of all that is marvellous about Noto. Yet people come here – to Caffè Sicilia in Noto, a small, sublimely beautiful city in the south of Sicily – from all over the world to taste these things, to rhapsodise and obsess over them, and perhaps to catch a glimpse of the magician who, in the kitchen in the basement, conjures them into being. Nothing on the menu is fancy or expensive. They are clear and easy to read but unevenly spaced and misaligned, betraying a human touch – not carelessness but everyday imperfection, which I find extremely charming. The letters sit in furrows in the felt and can be rearranged by hand. The menu in what may be the greatest pastry shop on the face of the earth is spelled out in plastic block-capital letters on a black felt board on a wall next to the cash register.
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