Guido Martinetti (left) and Frederico Grom (right), owners of Grom
Luna Rosso (raspberry and cream), May's flavor of the month
I guess I was in an ice cream mood today. Now that the weather is getting warmer I've been thinking of making gelato. I went to the bookstore this evening to check out books of ice cream recipes. There was nothing worth buying, but glancing at the recipes did reinforce my notion that ice cream, gelato, and sorbet are relatively easy to make. Get the basic proportions right and you're good to go.
Between Barnes and Noble and Fairway lies Grom, an Italian gelato maker that opened today. They were giving away samples yesterday. The line was a block long in the afternoon. There were only a dozen people in line this evening. Mr. Grom was working the crowd. He said there was a line all day today, and that the cash register's computer died earlier in the day. Despite the computer outage the line moved quick.
As an aside, the Times carried an article about the shop last week. Toward the end of the article there's a bizarre paragraph where the reporter explains that the name of the shop was "neither a marketing concept nor a cute acronym" but Mr. Grom's surname, which "reflected the winemaking tradition of putting the family name on the label." I guess the Times couldn't trust their readers to make the connection between Grom, the shop, and Frederico Grom, the co-owner, who is quoted and referred to several times in the article and whose picture accompanies the article.
Grom mixes the liquid base for their flavors in Turin. The base is frozen and sent to their outlets, where it is thawed and whipped into gelato or sorbet. I ordered a small luna rosso, which was the flavor of the month. It was quite good --dense and creamy. It was also expensive --$4.75 plus tax for that a small cup. That cup, by the way, is made of biodegradable paper, unlike the plastic cups used by Il Laboratorio del Gelato on the Lower East Side.
Anyway, at $4.75 a small serving I don't see myself becoming a regular. While I was in San Francisco I tried ice cream that was far, far better and roughly half the price. Sure, the price of getting to San Francisco raises the per scoop charge, but it might be worth the extra cost. That's a story for another day.
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