Ora tentano il salto e aprono qui a New York (inaugurazione sabato 5 maggio). Da non perdere!
Vi allego l'articolo apparso ieri sul NY Times.
2 Turin Gelato Men, Hoping New York Will Melt
TURIN, Italy
A few years ago Guido Martinetti, a young winemaker here, noted to a friend, Federico Grom, that Italy suffered from an odd market gap. Its gelato was plenty good, he observed, but few made it the way Italians approach food and wine generally: with only fresh seasonal products, the highest-quality ingredients and handmade care.
“I forgot what I said to Federico,” Mr. Martinetti, 32, said. “But a week later he came back with a business plan for five years.”
Thus Grom gelato was born, and in just four years, not much time in traditionbound Italy, it outstripped the business plan and earned a name as one of the best. “Sensationally good,” one top food expert here has called it.
On Saturday, Grom opens its first shop in the United States, at Broadway and 76th Street in Manhattan, and it does so with some nervous questions:
Are Americans, whose tastes often tend toward the robust and even flashy, ready for a gelato created almost like the subtle wines the Piedmont region here is famous for?
And maybe more to the point, will they pay the matching price, starting at $4.75 for a small cone?
“You have this culture — big, big in everything,” Mr. Martinetti said. “In Italy, there is sort of a different way.”
“But I think when you taste this ice cream, it’s more fresh,” he said. “It’s more natural. I am an optimist.”
He was speaking, in a white lab coat and a hairnet, in Grom’s factory near the Turin airport, pint-size but big enough to supply the nine existing shops in Italy and five more, including New York’s, in the works.
The company’s whole way of being was on display. Five workers were slicing spring strawberries for sorbet, made only with San Bernardo mineral water from Piedmont. Mr. Martinetti was surrounded by boxes of high-grade Ecuadorean and Venezuelan chocolate, hazelnut paste from Piedmont and Madagascar vanilla.
Into a huge steel vat, workers had just poured several cases of $30-a-bottle Spanish sherry for one flavor, Málaga, otherwise made of milk, organic eggs and sugar. (Raisins would be added later.) Mr. Martinetti dunked a lowly plastic cup into the vat and poked his nose in as if it were a glass of his family’s Barolo.
He sniffed, then tasted. It is pretentious to say about ice cream, but maybe the best word — apart from “delicious” — would be “balanced,” with each ingredient nicely playing off the others rather than one shouting over the rest.
“It’s what I look for in wine and ice cream,” Mr. Martinetti said, shucking off any high-mindedness by noting, too, that Coke’s sweetness wouldn’t work if it weren’t balanced by citric acid.
“I don’t want to say it’s the best ice cream,” he added, though clearly that is his ambition. “But it’s very serious. It’s made in a serious way.”
That seriousness is reflected in the price, which is significantly higher than those of his competitors. Il Laboratorio del Gelato, on the Lower East Side, which also makes fresh, high-quality gelato, charges $3.25 for a small serving of two flavors, $4.50 for medium and $5.75 for large. Grom’s medium will go for $5.75, the large for $6.75. Grom’s “huge” size — not a very Italian concept, although it is available here, too — will cost $9.
“It’s a different approach,” said Mr. Grom, 34, a business executive before settling in full time at Grom two years ago. “We hope the clients will accept the idea and understand. For sure we don’t sell quantity. We sell quality.
“We think New York is ready.”
Indeed, New York has no shortage of either high-quality ice cream or gelato — the Italian version, which is lower in butterfat and whipped with less air than American ice cream.
Jon Snyder, the New York gelato guru who owns Laboratorio and who also created and sold the Ciao Bella chain of gelato shops, said that although Grom’s price is higher, New Yorkers may well pay it if the product is good enough.
“In New York and certain cities, you can almost charge what you want,” he said, though he added that his own prices reflect the fact that his retail customers are not quite so well-heeled. “If you have a quality product, people will come and buy it.”
Though he travels to Italy often, he said he hasn’t yet tried Grom here and is “looking forward” to visiting the shop in New York to see how it stacks up.
“I’m so often disappointed with other people’s products,” he said. “It’s nice to see someone open and be impressed.”
In Italy — a nation of inherited wealth, tight family businesses and enterprise often stultified by bureaucracy — Mr. Martinetti and Mr. Grom stand out, quite apart from whether their gelato succeeds in New York.
Rather than depend on their parents, the two took out loans to start Grom on their own. And their growth here — with stores crowded by long lines in cities including Turin, Milan and Florence — is unusual for a concern open for such a short time. (It also says a lot about the difficulties of doing business in Italy that they found it more appealing to open a store in New York than in Rome, where they do not have a shop. They say they do not have the “right partners” even to attempt the far south — Naples, say, or Sicily.)
They also broke the mold here in how their shops get the gelato — a model that makes opening in New York, or anywhere else, less difficult than it might have been.
Normally, Italian gelaterias contract with ingredients suppliers, then mix and whip the gelato on site according to their own recipes. Mr. Martinetti and Mr. Grom came up with a different model by chance: the ice cream maker in their first shop, here in Turin, was hurt in a scooter accident, and Mr. Grom and Mr. Martinetti, both still working their other jobs, were forced to make the gelato themselves at night. They did not sleep much.
With plans to open other stores, they realized that their margin for the unexpected was thin. Another accident or sickness by any individual ice cream maker could close down a shop. So they decided to centralize.
Now the liquid base for all their flavors — 20 a month, changing as different fruits come into season — is made entirely at their little plant here, frozen in bags and shipped off to each shop. There it is thawed, whipped and frozen again, with final ingredients like raisins or chocolate chips added at the end.
This gives them complete control over the gelato’s quality — something Mr. Martinetti approaches with such orthodoxy that even his father, an obsessive high-end wine maker, calls his son “a Taliban.” To ensure that they get the best fruit, they have bought a vineyard near Turin and are uprooting the vines to plant their own strawberries, melons, apricots, peaches, raspberries and figs.
For anyone who might puzzle over the name Grom, it is neither a marketing concept nor a cute acronym starting with “gelato” and ending in “mangiare.” It is simply Mr. Grom’s surname, reflecting the winemaking tradition of putting the family name on the label.
Just before their first shop opened in 2003, Mr. Martinetti surprised Mr. Grom by insisting that the business be named after him. Mr. Grom claims he was terrified, but Mr. Martinetti coolly reasoned that his own name was already on his family’s wine label.
“When you make top-quality food, you have to put your name on it,” Mr. Martinetti said.
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