Eat This Riverside: Outstanding Italo-Argentine Ice Cream at Benedetto Gelato

In one of my many previous lives, when I was a travel agent, I used to go to Italy a few times a year for “research” with a crowd of other travel professionals. The Italian government, in its infinite wisdom, saw fit to fund our attendance at regional tourism expos. They’d fly us over on Alitalia, load us up into motorcoaches, and trundle us about to lesser-visited corners of Italy’s 21 regioni, where we’d connect with tour operators in spasmodically air-conditioned convention halls and haggle over prices for airport transfers and half-day guided cultural tours. We’d eat the local specialties, drink the local wine, see the local sights, and flirt with the local convention staff. I rode a Vespa through the vineyards of Friuli–Venezia Giulia and toured eleven tiny grappa producers in the Piedmontese countryside southeast of Turin.

Local culinary traditions are very important to the culture of the places you visit in Italy. Each little town has its own pasta shape or traditional sauce or culinary specialty that is unique and specific to that place. It’s a culinary version of the idea of campanilismo: that one’s allegiance is not to country or region or even city, but to the tiniest subdivisions of Italian geography—the area that surrounds the campanile, or bell tower, that casts its shadow on the neighborhood where you grew up. If you grew up eating pizza in Caserta, the stuff they serve in Rome is an abomination; if you were raised eating lardo di Colonnata in the hills near Carrara, then the pancetta from down in the valley will always seem second best.

Campanilismo aside, certain foods are universally beloved across the Italian peninsula. No matter where you are in Italy, after dinner, you’ll find families out for their evening passeggiata—the postprandial promenade—walking down the main drag, decked out in crisply ironed shirts and impossible heels, enjoying the camaraderie and people-watching.

And while you’re on the passeggiata, you can tell when you’re getting close to a gelateria, because more and more of the passersby will have cups and cones of colorful ice cream in every flavor. Gelato is the official snack of the passeggiata. It’s nearly compulsory to stop for one every night (and often in the afternoon, too).

Many of my happiest Italy memories are associated with stops for ice cream: the unforgettable coppa of sorbet I found at Gelateria San Crispino, just behind the Trevi Fountain in Rome, made from plums so tart and sweet that the gelato tasted more like plums than any plum I’d ever eaten. The intense licorice-flavored ice cream from the spot across from the pizzeria in Montepulciano where the waiter flirted shamelessly with my octogenarian mother. The cantaloupe and strawberry scoops, each wedged into their own section of a double cone, where I’d go after the movies in Perugia. The joy of watching my son chase pigeons in a nameless square in Venice, chocolate gelato smudged all over his face and hands. I like gelato.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that I was excited when I heard that an Italian-style ice cream shop was opening up in the Farm House Collective—and I’m pleased to report that the gelato on offer at Benedetto Gelato is excellent.

Benedetto Gelato is owned by Pablo “Andrés” Ferreire and his wife, Maresa Peralta Márquez. They’d lived in Argentina, where the obsession with gelato eclipses even the Italian ice cream mania. “In Argentina, gelato shops are on every corner, like coffee shops are here,” Ferreire told me. “If you’re going out with friends on Friday or Saturday night, you’ll stop for a gelato and then bring a kilogram home to eat while you watch a movie. The quality of the gelato offering there is superb!”

When Andrés and Maresa arrived in Southern California seven years ago, they were surprised by how difficult it was to find gelato of the same caliber they were used to in Argentina. “We were living in Lake Forest, and we’d drive an hour or an hour and a half just to get a kind of ‘good enough’ gelato.”

Faced with this insupportable scarcity, Maresa hatched a plan to create the kind of ice cream shop she missed from back home. At first, she didn’t mention this plan to Andrés. “I was pretty busy with a full-time job, and she was on maternity leave, so she started doing some research on her own on the market and what it might take to open our own gelato shop.” She went down the rabbit hole, going as far as to introduce herself via Instagram direct message to a well-regarded Argentine gelato maker named Maximiliano Maccarrone, who had started several chains of ice cream shops across Latin America and had won the Coppa Monda della Gelateria, one of the most prestigious prizes in the gelato trade.

When Maccarrone invited her to meet up at a gelato expo in Italy, she had to let Andrés in on her secret plans. Andrés tells me she showed him her research and the conversations with Maccarrone and said, “You should travel to Italy to meet him!” I thought, “You’re crazy, but let’s do it.” The meeting was a success, the expo was a gelato inspiration, and the relationship with Maccarrone developed into a gelato partnership. A year later, with Maccarrone on board as a consultant, Andrés and Maresa found the space at the Farmhouse Collective and launched their gelato fantasy into reality.

And what a gelato dream it is. On a recent visit, I tasted all of the 20 flavors in their freezer case. Benedetto’s gelato is uniformly good, and certain flavors, like their lemon-mint or citrus symphony, are exuberantly tart masterpieces of the ice cream arts. Gelato flavors rotate in and out of the case based on the season: Last week, they introduced a deep-red raspberry sorbet, almost jammy with fruit essence and crunchy with raspberry seeds. Crema di Francisco, a vanilla gelato variant laced with honey and lemon that Maccarrone originally designed as a gift for Pope Francis, is on its way into the case when the mascarpone/mixed berry flavor runs out.

I liked their Dubai Chocolate, light milk chocolate gelato topped with shreds of kunafa pastry and pistachios. I also liked their hazelnut crisp, an ersatz ice cream version of a Ferrero Rocher chocolate candy. Some of their flavors are so rich and dense that a little goes a long way: Pistachio lovers will enjoy their tannish-green Sicilian pistachio gelato; pistachio likers may find it a little too deeply nutty, almost like chilled pistachio butter rather than ice cream. But that’s a minor quibble — the quality of the gelato is very high at Benedetto, and I am happy to have the chance to explore their ice cream offerings.

Benedetto’s gelato is not cheap: A small cup with two flavors will set you back $8 plus tax. But Andrés is happy to defend his pricing. When I asked about his reaction to customers who say the ice cream is expensive, he told me, “As a fan of good food and a fan of good gelato shops, I never mind paying for a premium, healthy, artisanal product. The beauty of our gelato at Benedetto is that we have an open kitchen for all to see, using real food, real ingredients, real milk, real cream. With that comes certain costs. But I’ll say … try it, it’ll be worth it. We will never open a shop and offer anything less than excellent.”

If you have the means, stop by and check it out!

More information: Benedetto Gelato is at the Farmhouse Collective, 1393 University Ave. If you enter from the parking lot, it’s directly across the promenade to the right of the restrooms. They’re open from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Preview the flavors at their Instagram page: @gelatobenedetto.