One More Scoop

Dear diary. Let me tell you about the poster.

It hangs on the wall of the metro station near my flat, just above the bench where I wait for the train. Somebody put it there at the start of the summer and nobody has taken it down. It is a simple thing: a big pink background, a single cone with three wobbly scoops stacked on top of each other, and above it, in round, happy letters, the words ONE MORE SCOOP.

I have looked at that poster every day for three months. I have missed trains looking at it. I am fairly sure it is my favourite piece of art in the entire city.

And last night, on one of those warm late-summer evenings when the air feels like a soft blanket and nobody wants to go home, I decided it was finally time to do what the poster said.

The rules of the hunt

I don’t just go and get ice cream. That would be far too quick. I go on a hunt. And a proper ice-cream hunt has rules, which I have refined over many summers:

• Walk, don’t ride. The best ice-cream places are found on foot, usually down a side street you wouldn’t otherwise take.
• Look at the colours. Pistachio that is greenish-brown rather than bright green is a very good sign. So is banana that is pale rather than yellow.
• Watch the locals. If there is a little queue of people who look like they live around the corner, join it.
• Never rush the choosing. Ask for a taste. Then another taste. The person behind the counter will understand. Probably.
• Always leave room for one more. Obviously.

First stop: too bright

I started near the river, where there is a big ice-cream parlour with neon lights and mountains of ice cream piled up in the display, decorated with whole wafers and chocolate pieces. It looked spectacular. It looked like a photograph.

But the mountains were so tall and so bright that I was suspicious. Very colourful, very fluffy ice cream piled up tall often looks better than it tastes. So I just admired it, the way you admire a fancy hat in a window display, and walked on.

Second stop: almost

The second place was much better. A small parlour under an arch, with metal lids on the tubs so you couldn’t see the flavours until you asked. The woman behind the counter lifted each lid one by one and told me the name of every flavour like she was introducing me to old friends.

I had a single scoop of lemon. It was sharp and bright and tasted like actual lemons. Very good. But it was a lemon kind of evening only for the first five minutes, and then the sun started to sink and the sky started turning peach, and I knew I needed something softer.

Nah… just one more. The first scoop is for the hunger. The second is for the sunset. The third one is just for being alive on a warm evening.

The perfect scoop

I found it by accident, which is how the best things are found.

I had turned into a narrow street because I liked the look of a balcony covered in flowers. At the end of the street there was a tiny parlour with a striped awning and a hand-painted sign. No neon. No mountains. Just a short row of covered tubs and an old man who looked like he had been making ice cream since before the street had a name.

I asked him what he recommended. He thought about it seriously, which I appreciated. Then he said: “Hazelnut. Then fior di latte. Not the other way around.”

So that is what I had. Two scoops in a small cup, hazelnut on the bottom, fior di latte on top.

The hazelnut tasted like it had been toasted that morning. The fior di latte was cool, simple and milky, like the softest cloud you can imagine. Together they were the kind of thing that makes you stop walking and just stand there in the middle of a pavement with your eyes closed. Which is exactly what I did.

The warm wall

I carried my cup to the old city wall, where the stones stay warm long after the sun has gone. I sat there with my legs dangling and watched the sky go from peach to pink to lilac, while the swifts zipped overhead and the city lights came on beneath me.

I ate very slowly. Ice cream is not something to finish. It is something to accompany you through a sunset.

When I scraped the last bit from the cup, I looked at the sky, which still had a little pink left in it, and I knew what I had to do. I walked back down the narrow street. The old man was pulling the shutter halfway down. He saw me coming, sighed in a way that was mostly a smile, and lifted it up again.

“One more?” he asked.

“One more,” I said.

Pistachio, this time. The proper greenish-brown kind.

Back at the station

I took the last metro home, a little sticky around the beak, very content. When I sat down on the bench, there it was: the poster. Big pink background. Three wobbly scoops. ONE MORE SCOOP.

I nodded at it like an old friend. It has been right all summer.

If you’d like to go on your own hunt, I wrote a proper guide to tasting and choosing in The Gelato Guide: One More Scoop. And for evenings that start with ice cream and keep going long after dark, have a look at the joy of just one more.

Late summer doesn’t last forever. That is exactly why you should have another scoop. — P.