Getting the Scoop: Behind the Scenes at Gioia's Gelateria

Raspberry sorbet on top, dark chocolate-coconut sorbet on the bottom. Gioia’s sorbets are vegan, including the dark chocolate. This combo plays like a raspberry cream that you’d find in a box of chocolates.

Just past the original locations of Sally’s and Pepe’s on New Haven’s legendary Wooster Street is Gioia. Opened by restaurateurs and longtime industry guys Avi Szapiro and Tim Cabral in 2023, Gioia is a fascinating concept. It’s not only a restaurant, it’s got a gourmet market, a rooftop that switches its theme seasonally, and a walk-up window where you can snag square pizza slices and gelato.

That last part is what this is about. And when we’re talking about great ice cream in Connecticut, Gioia would like to enter the conversation.

Nick Hurwitz-Goodman blending a fresh batch of hazelnut gelato before it goes into Gioia’s Cattabriga Ice Cream Machine that’ll have a batch whipped up in roughly five minutes. From there, it goes into a blast chiller to maintain its fluffiness and mouthfeel.

For those with nut allergies, fear not. Before they make other non-nut flavors, they take the machine apart, clean it, and sanitize it to prevent cross contamination. Separate scoops are used when you order as well.

Running the gelato program at Gioia is Nick Hurwitz-Goodman, the restaurant’s pastry chef, who said that making ice cream for the dessert menu, in pints in their market, and for cups and cones via the window was an idea from the jump.

“Tim and Avi had the window built as an original part of the building,” he says. “They hired me as pastry chef and let me run with it. A focus on house-made gelato is one of our defining characteristics. We wanted to have a window where people could come up and just enjoy Italian ice cream and be that neighborhood gelato spot. We’re getting to know the regulars and locals who’ve become loyal to us. It’s getting to know the neighborhood through the window.”

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What keeps them coming back might be the flavors—pistachio, hazelnut, olive oil, all the standard ones, too. But how about roasted pear and honey sorbet? What about white chocolate – cranberry? Or maybe blueberry with summer corn caramel?

It could also be the creaminess, the velvety mouthfeel, the freshness of each tiny batch, and letting those flavors shine, free of additives.

For Gioia’s customers, it’s likely all of those things.

“We were making the (gelato) base and the pistachio paste at first, but state regulations prevented us from doing that, so we source proprietary blends from someone else,” Hurwitz-Goodman explains. “The base is just seven percent milk fat, a low milk fat, so it’s just a lot of milk, a little bit of cream, sugar, and milk powder, all those things you need to stabilize the product. The milk fat is low because you want gelato to be dense—American ice cream is whipped, so it’s fattier and coats your tongue in a different way. Gelato is about that flavor of the milk and the flavor of the ingredients. It’s churned slower and there’s less ice crystallization and that pure flavor shines.”

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Their pistachio paste? It’s got zero fillers. Just nuts. Hurwitz-Goodman and the team only add salt to it to further accentuate the pistachio and to get that concentrated flavor, as salt, when making gelato, will make those flavors pop and balance out sweetness.

And they never add any additional sugar and definitely no corn syrup, preferring to let the fruit be the star and the natural sweetener, for instance, that previously mentioned roasted pear and honey sorbet is just water, the roasted pears, and honey.

If you lean more savory, olive oil gelato with extra olive oil and fennel pollen.

Sundaes? They don’t really do that at the window. If you walk up, expect simple toppings like rainbow sprinkles, nuts, crunchy cookies, and the like. Inside at the restaurant, they will occasionally do sundae specials.

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Aside from the common flavors, though, Gioia likes to experiment with locally grown seasonal ingredients when that’s possible.

“We always have pistachio, hazelnut, vanilla, chocolate, and espresso, and mango and raspberry sorbets, but olive oil gelato has become a sleeper hit; it’s our most savory and at the window, it’s what people ask to try a sample of the most—it’s just our gelato base, olive oil, and salt,” Hurwitz-Goodman says. “We go local during summer, so we’ve done basil, mint, and lemon verbena, sourcing it from local farms like Muddy Roots in Wallingford. And if it grows together, it goes together, so that’s how we came up with the blueberry-corn.”

Even though Gioia’s gelateria cranks out flavors in a super small batch way at four liters per, they’re open to taking on wholesale accounts and they’ve already started with the likes of Siena Ristorante in New Haven, Cafe Melba in Milford, and at Rebel Dog Coffee Co.’s East Hartford location where you can have Gioia’s gelato in some of their caffeinated drinks.

For Gioia, getting their gelato program up to snuff wasn’t seamless. Hurwitz-Goodman mentioned he probably “messed up more times than I got it right” when testing flavors. Now, being able to produce it for other establishments and in their own restaurant, market, and street level pick up window, it was worth all the hard work.

His bosses agree.

“It took time to get it where it is,” Szapiro says. “I give a lot of credit to Nick. He knows what he’s doing.”

And he’s certainly ecstatic about the quality of the gelato, especially the pistachio.

“When I owned Roia, I went to Italy every year,” he continues. “After the jet lag wore off, my wife and I would go to five or so gelato shops within walking distance on the first day to try to find the best pistachio, so we would know which one we would keep going back to during seven or eight days there. Despite challenges with certain ingredients here, he got it as close as possible to a pistachio gelato you’d get in Sicily.”

150 Wooster Street, New Haven
475.250.3451, gioianewhaven.com/gelateria
Hours vary by season, so check their website beforehand!