The only place for ice cream

"I want a chocolate cone," a little boy tells his father solemnly. He is barely tall enough to see inside the cases.
"OK," Dad says, "but what kind of ice cream do you want?"
"In a chocolate cone!"
"You can have a chocolate cone. Do you want pink, blue or green ice cream?"
"Green," the little boy answers.
"One mint chocolate chip," the father says to the young man behind the counter.
"In a chocolate cone!" the child chimes up excitedly.

When I tell people that La Casa Gelato has every flavour of ice cream you can imagine, they nod, like they know what that means. And, without fail, when I take them there, they stand among the cases that line three walls, each full of buckets of ice cream and they say: "They really do have every flavour!" That's when I tell them that they haven't even seen all the options yet. Less then half of the owner's creations are in the cases at any one time.

"They have curry ice cream!" one teen exclaims to another.
"They've got garlic ice cream!" the other points.
"I dare you to sample the jalapeño!" another chimes in.

La Casa Gelato has more then 508 flavours; there's a rotation, with 218 varieties on display at any one time. Local mythology says that whenever the owner, Vince, fights with his wife, Pina, he ends up in the kitchen, inventing a new ice cream. Five hundred and eight successes, plus countless failures, over the twenty years that they've been running their factory and shop... they are Italian.

The store is warm and it smells like the fresh waffle cones. There's something like Italian show tunes playing today. One song is in English, and one line makes everyone in the busy store laugh:

"I know a fellow who will only go out with a girl if he likes how she looks.
I disagree – the only thing that matters in a girl is how she cooks."

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, it doesn't matter how cold it is outside, the inside is crowded. If you are smart enough to go in on a quiet, rainy Vancouver night, you may catch Pina behind the counter. Though all of the staff is quick to fetch samples, Pina, Mrs. Gelato herself, loves to offer her favourites up for you to try. She is a plump Italian grandmother – she obviously has a lot of favourites.

There's peanut butter blueberry ice cream today – I haven't seen that one before. The lime tequila sorbetto isn't out, but there's three kinds of Bailey's ice cream available: Bailey's, Bailey's chocolate cheesecake and Bailey's with coconut.

There's a whole case that could only have occurred on the border of Little Italy and Chinatown: dragonfruit, taro root, red bean and durian gelato. The durian is the only one in the store with a lid on it.

"I don't know what to choose!" an elderly woman half-whispers to her daughter. She isn't speaking English, but it is something so often said here that I recognize the sentiment despite the language barrier.

If you get the two scoop cone or the one liter container, you can have two selections together. Choosing two flavours that will go well together is an art. It can take a long time to weigh all the options.

"I've chosen!" a young man declares triumphantly to his friends, holding his cone like a trophy, "Apple cinnamon and pear gorgonzola!"
"Gorgonzola? That's blue cheese, right?" one friend wrinkles his nose.
"Yeah! Wanna try?"
"Ah, no. I'll pass, thanks."