Walk past this house most days and you’ll see a normal garage but every other Saturday it’s a gelato shop with customers queuing around the block
No cars inside this garage – it’s the home of a tasty, handmade treat(Image: Rob Browne/WalesOnline)
Tucked away at the bottom of the driveway of a suburban house of a busy Welsh city is an unassuming garage that some people might say is serving some of the best gelato outside of Italy.
This is Il Gelataio, a hidden Italian gelato shop nestled within Llanishen Village, Cardiff, which sees queues running down the street when it opens as a ‘pop up’ shop, every other Saturday. It’s run by Gareth Church, who took up making gelato as a hobby after he retired in 2016, with the help of his wife, Claire.
After several trips to Italy and a masterclass course from an Italian expert Gareth began to master the craft of gelato making. He said: “As a young lad I was always passionate about ice cream, but at that point I didn’t know anything about gelato. All of this now has just come from having that passion.” For the latest restaurant news and reviews, sign up to our food and drink newsletter here
Open the garage doors every other Saturday and you will greeted not by a car but by Gareth and his gelato(Image: Rob Browne/WalesOnline)
The garage, which has been painstakingly decorated to evoke the feeling of a real Italian gelateria, is built with bricks that Gareth salvaged over the years when travelling the country for work in the motorbike industry. Before being turned into the gelateria, the garage was being used to store Gareth’s motorbikes.
Gelato is known for being denser, creamier and having richer flavours than the ice cream most people might be used to eating. Gareth said: “What makes gelato different from ice cream is that gelato has less fat content, is far more flavoursome, it’s not sickly and it doesn’t leave a greasy film in your mouth.”
Gelato is also stored at a lower temperature than regular ice cream, at around –12 degrees compared to the –20 standard for ice cream. Gareth said that this means your taste buds are less numbed by the cold, so that you can enjoy the flavours more.
Gareth inside his garage transformed into his hidden handmade gelato shop(Image: Rob Browne/WalesOnline)
Gareth takes great pride in his ingredients, sourcing all his milk and cream from a local gold award dairy and many of his natural flavourings directly from small producers in Italy. When WalesOnline visited, Gareth was making an ice cream using pistachios that came from a small family farm in Sicily.
He said: “One of the greatest things about making this artisanal is sourcing the ingredients. We have people come in and try it and say things like, ‘Oh my God, I can actually taste the strawberries in this,’ and that’s because of the quality of the ingredients.”
“I want to produce the best quality product I can produce, at a price that is affordable to people from Llanishen and the surrounding areas.” The price for a one-scoop cone of gelato from Il Gelataio is £3.
Gareth making the next batch of gelato inside his former garage(Image: Rob Browne/WalesOnline)
Most weeks, Il Gelataio has between 10 and 15 flavours on offer, but the shop has sold 55 different flavours of ice cream during its time, including more unconventional flavours like marzipan and liquorice. If he had to choose, Gareth says his favourite flavours of the gelato he makes would be raspberry ripple, cherry, and cremino (Italian chocolate and hazelnut).
After making a batch of gelato, Gareth uses a specialist machine, built using an Italian design from 1927, to churn the mixture. The finished gelato is then stored in a ‘pozetti’ freezer, imported from Italy, to keep it at exactly the right temperature.
Gareth said that Il Gelataio has had fantastic feedback from the local community, and with an increase in online attention is now getting visitors from much further afield.
Gareth takes pride in the ingredients he uses to create his popular gelato(Image: Rob Browne/WalesOnline)
“Food in general brings people together and gelato especially does. Someone said recently that at the start of the queue [for the gelato], you are strangers with the person next to you, but at the end, you’re neighbours with them,” he said.
Seeing people happily queueing for his gelato means the world to Gareth. He said: “It’s fantastic, it makes me lost for words to be honest and it’s great that people share the passion that I have.”
Despite their popularity, Gareth is not planning on opening the shop more regularly, as to him gelato-making remains just a hobby rather than a business. Il Gelataio is open every other Saturday from 11-4, or until the gelato is sold out. Its next open day is April 30. Follow Gareth and his gelato on Instagram here.