The GROM adventure!
("il gelato come una volta")
GELATO ITALIANO! It is a shared secret that Italy is the "Gelato" country. There are almost more ice-cream shops in Italian cities than cafes (cafeterias) in Athens.
Growing up in a provincial city in Greece, I was not really an ice-cream fan as a kid. Maybe it was the poor selection of that time: "Κρέμα, σοκολάτα, φράουλα" (vanilla, chocolate, strawberry) was calling the ice-cream man pushing his ice-cream cart in the narrow streets of Larisa.
As an adult, I came across some incredibly fancy ice-cream shops and yummy tastes (cucumber! aubergine!). But, well.... ice-cream....so what?
Then, some years ago in Milano, on a rainy winter evening, I got into an ice-cream shop to wait for the rain to stop. That was in Corso Buenos Aires. Lots of people around slurping their ice-cream cones and yummying. I decided to taste some "marron glacé" ice-cream, as I am nuts about chestnuts. That was it! The Apocalypses! The following days I tried almost all flavors: pistachio, nocciola, torroncino, fiordilatte, gianduja, liquirizia.... And this is how I became a GROMadict! As you can understand, that was a GROM Gelateria I had just visited.
Since that day, not only I have visited almost all GROM shops in northern Italy (Milano, Genova, Torino, Aosta, Alessandria, Bergamo, Asti, Siena, Verona, Venezia, Padova, Perugia....), but I also followed it in faraway places: Paris, Osaka, Hong Kong, Nice, New York.
August 2017, Genova. I tasted the "flavor of the month": yogurt ice-cream with peach and crunchy hazelnuts.... a flavor to die for!
Asti, Piemonte
Nice, France. November 2022
In February 2018, I discovered that there were 3 Grom ice cream shops in NYC: one at Columbus Circle (1796 Broadway), one at Greenwich Village (233 Bleecker Street) and one at the World Trade Center (185 Greenwich street). I tried them all!
At the Columbus Circle Grom, NYC. February 2018.
Roma. March 2023
NOT GROM!
Great childhood memories: 70s ice cream street vendor at Monastiraki, Athens
(ΠΑΓΩΤΑ Ο ΓΙΩΡΓΟΣ = George's Ice Cream)