Description
Leo Bulgarini is the wrong guy to mouth off to the day after his beloved AS Roma squad drops a game to Genoa or Inter Milan. His gelati are labeled only in Italian, and his standards are so famously strict that he has been known to pull his delicious sorbetti from the menus of restaurants and the freezer cases of retailers that in one way or another fail to come up to his standards. A big photograph on the wall of his Altadena shop shows him making an obscene Italian gesture to a giant Sicilian ice cream plant. But the gelateria, the love child of Roman expat Bulgarini and his Altadena-raised wife, Elizabeth Foldi, is a singular, perfect blossom in a world of international sweets conglomerates and by-the-book mixes: fragrant Sicilian pistachio gelato, vivid blood orange sorbetto, subtle cinnamon cream and dark, smoky chocolate gelati flavored with orange peel, with fresh hazelnuts or with rum. And Leo probably pulls the best espresso shot in the San Gabriel Valley when he's in the mood, a thick, syrupy thimbleful made with an antique Italian machine. If you don't believe me, ask him yourself.
