For love and gelato
Cuore di Vetro, Berlin
I’d planned to share something else this week, but the weather went from “pleasantly warm” to “face-melting” and suddenly ice cream was the only thing I wanted to eat. Berlin may not be well-known for its frozen confections abroad, but as someone who has lived in Italy, I would argue it rivals Florence. For one of my first-ever reporting assignments here, I went around to nine of the city’s top parlors. In the process, I learned that what makes Berlin’s ice cream culture so special is that it’s both seasonal and accessible to everyone. Even as prices at restaurants and bars climb precipitously, ice cream parlors continue to serve an incredibly high-end product, often made on the premises with organic ingredients, for €1-2 a scoop.
Since then, some shops have closed, like the lovely Sardinian-run Anna Durkes, while other standouts have opened. Most impressive among the newcomers is Jones Ice Cream in Schöneberg, where Gabrielle Jones churns out intensely flavorful scoops of black sesame and mango-passionfruit that hew close to the American style. On weekends, the whole place smells of burnt sugar from the freshly made waffle cones. Over on the gelato end of the spectrum is Duo Sicilian Ice Cream in Kreuzberg, a family-run business that also offers excellent mini-cannolis. Order your scoop in a brioche for a messy, melty, Sicilian-style ice cream sandwich.
As wonderful as both are, my favorite by far is still Cuore di Vetro, named for the 1976 Werner Herzog film Heart of Glass. I keep coming back both because I believe it makes the best gelato in town and because it was born from such a quintessentially Berlin love story. When I first interviewed Guido Dorigo and Angelika Kaswalder in 2014, the young, Italian musician couple had just set up shop in Mitte a year ago. From the beginning, they were determined to do everything their way. They made all the flavors by hand, steps from where they were served, with ingredients like single-origin chocolates and in-house-roasted hazelnuts from Piedmont. People hung around for live music gigs in the evenings and shots of espresso in the afternoons.
Nowadays, Cuore di Vetro is popular enough that the line on sunny Sunday afternoons resembles Berghain’s and the couple has opened a second branch in Friedrichshain. Part of its fame stems from its celebrity clientele—Nick Cave is reportedly a fan—and David Bowie tribute ice creams. While I personally find White Duke (with almonds and apricot marmalade) a tad sweet, the dark chocolate sorbet with chilies, the buttery salted caramel, and the crème brûlée with caramelized walnuts are all outstanding. Best of all is the pistachio, made with nuts sourced from a fifth-generation Sicilian farm and a generous pinch of salt.
Most of all, I love that this little gelateria has clung to its charm through the years and growing accolades. Both Dorigo and Kaswalder can regularly be seen in the glass-encased kitchen or chatting with the Italian expats who flock here. On summer afternoons, it becomes something of a de facto gathering hub in a neighborhood increasingly bereft of community spaces. Kids from the nearby playground tend to trickle over and regulars linger on the benches long after the last bite.
What I’m Reading
Whetstone Magazine’s digital launch is a cause for optimism in an otherwise bleak media landscape. Editor-in-Chief Stephen Satterfield has created a smart, uncompromising publication in defiance of all odds and current industry trends. It was a brave move to lead with a print magazine, especially one with a global perspective that eschews clickbait for nuanced longform pieces about foodways. Summer in Sweden: Where the Wild Berries Grow by Clarissa Wei will make you want to move to a densely forested Nordic place. After you’ve read it, be sure to watch the first episode of her noodle series for Goldthread. It’s about Lanzhou lamian, the hand-pulled noodles from northwestern China that are as difficult to make as they are delightful to slurp.
“Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation,” writes anthropologist Wade Davis in The Unraveling of America (Rolling Stone). While there have been plenty such pieces since the onset of COVID-19, few authors have proven their point with such damning clarity.
I very much enjoyed Aisha Harris’s profile Juliana Huxtable’s Next Chapter (The New York Times), on the prolific artist and poet currently writing her way through the pandemic at her Berlin studio in Kreuzberg.
Like many people, I suspect, New York Magazine’s Grub Street Diet series is a mild obsession and guilty pleasure of mine. Every bit as voyeuristic and often far more revealing than the publication’s Sex Diaries, it is the ultimate example of how eating has become a performative act in our culture. Ziwe Fumudoh’s is like her show: insightful, funny, and often a little painful—a meditation on mental health and cultural heritage that has very little and everything to do with food. Her grandest cooking achievement is a pot of Nigerian-style jollof rice, a dish with a long, complex history that Jiji Majiri Ugboma explains in Jollof Wars (Eater). I love how Fumudoh contrasts the dish with the relative banality of an Italian staple, a not-so-subtle dig at Eurocentric food writing tropes. “The jollof rice, that’s labor intensive, that’s centuries of training being acted upon as I cook, as I put my foot into the dish. Cantaloupe with prosciutto is just having the ability to Google sweet and savory.”
Contrary to what certain Western media outlets seem to think, durian does not stink “of death” or old socks or rotting corpses. While it’s certainly pungent—there’s a reason it’s banned on public transportation in Singapore and Malaysia—it’s so distinctive that it defies such comparisons. Durian smells like durian and either you know it or you don’t. There’s no substitute for it, which is why those who develop a craving for the fruit’s custardy flesh will go to such great lengths to get it. Case in point: Ada Tseng’s piece on how the Pandemic economy inspires cousins to start ‘side hustle’ delivering fresh durian to O.C. and beyond (The Los Angeles Times).