GOOD THINGS: CREMERIA GABRIELE

An ice-cream emporium in the main street of Vico Equense with a word-of-mouth reputation, Cremeria Gabriele went global when the New York Times made it the focus of an immersive feature in September 2024.

Penned by Tamara Shopsin, it recounted two trips to the Sorrentine peninsula that the writer took with her husband. It was during the first, in 2010, shortly after her recovery from a brain tumour, that she discovered Gabriele’s gelato. It remained for her as a dream of ice-cream perfection, an unapproachable benchmark. Fourteen years later, Tamara decided to go back, just to check that her judgement hadn’t been clouded by Amalfi Coast sunshine, post-operative euphoria and Italian gioia di vivere.

It had not.

The Sirenuse Journal visited Cremeria Gabriele early one afternoon when it was buzzing with both visitors and locals. The latter are here not only for the gelato. The Cuomo family emporium’s wide offering is there in its name: Cremeria Gabriele. A true ‘creamery’, it began life as a cheese retailer, not an ice-cream parlour. This also explains why it’s almost as busy in winter as in summer (so does the fact that Italians don’t abandon gelato when it’s cold outside – in fact many aficionados claim it tastes even better then).

The cows that graze on the high summer pastures of the Monti Lattari (literally the ‘milky mountains’) above Vico are famous for their high-quality milk. In the early 1950s, Gabriele Cuomo opened a shop in Naples where he sold the artisanal cheeses he made from this prized milk. It was only later, in 1968 that he decided to launch what was at first a side gig – a gelateria back in his hometown. Tourism was taking off in and around Sorrento, locals were better off thanks to Italy’s ‘boom economico’, but Gabriele’s new venture was also a smart way of dealing with the dip in demand for cheese in summer, exactly when there was an abundance of milk.

Today, Cremeria Gabriele has a well-stocked cheese counter and also offers a range of Neapolitan pastries and cookies, as well as festive specialities like panettone. But its twenty-six or so varieties of gelato are, for most of the year, its core business. Today, the Cremeria is run by two of Gabriele’s grandsons, brothers Raffaele and Liberato Cuomo. As a couple of excited children eye the trays of ice-cream in an agony of indecision, Liberato talks to the Journal about the attention that goes into every single flavour. There is no such thing, he tells me, as a standard formula: the proportions of milk and other ingredients are always adjusted on a case-by-case basis. Fruit flavours like apricot or ‘annurca’ apple follow the seasons, while others are year-round fixtures. In addition to single-ingredient varieties like hazelnut or coffee, the Cremeria also offers a few composites. Some, like ricotta with caramelised figs, prove to be such hits that, Liberato says, “we just can’t retire it”. And yet it was, he recounts, created by accident, when a supplier delivered far more figs than the Cremeria had ordered for their seasonal preserves, and another use had to be found for them.

“Gelato making is a science that you never finish studying”, says Liberato. He reckons it to be even more complicated than the art of pizza, because of the number of variants and the fact that whereas pretty much any topping can be added to a pizza base, gelato is a shifting alchemy. Ingredients like chocolate, or walnuts, or raspberries, all call for different proportions of base ingredients to achieve the perfect finish.

Gelato perfection is something Gabriele has got rather good at over the last half-century. But despite all the plaudits and media coverage, they are not about to become a chain anytime soon. Why expand when you can live well, be happy, and serve a grateful community?

Cremeria Gabriele, Corso Umberto I° 8, Vico Equense. Open 8.30am-2pm, 4pm-12.30am, closed Tuesday.

Photos © Roberto Salomone