If you could have a personal moment of your life, unique to you, cherished by you and turned into ice cream, what would you create? Your mom's special yellow birthday cake, the packet of dunkaroos and icing you brought to dinner on the dock, and the blue of the lake? Maybe it was the bananas your mother brought from the store and the glass of orange juice you had while helping her unpack the groceries while she was telling you news from Brazil?

If you'd asked me what's personal about ice cream flavors before I went to Bebe Zito, I would have guessed that it's your favorite: my son always tries the vanilla. My grandma would physically start off with joy when the freezer contained black walnut.

But then I started going to Bebe Zito, the ice cream parlor that Ben Spangler, Milkjam's founding ice cream chef and longtime local pastry chef, and his wife Gabriella Grant, a designer and marketer, opened around the corner from Red Dragon Pandemic. Here every taste is personal, a story, a narrative.

"Romeu e Julieta" is a story from Grant's childhood, in which her Brazilian mother cooked a dessert with food that she could buy in Eagan – the ice cream is a little bit of guava paste, a little bit of cream cheese, a little bit of caramelized Ritz cracker crumble , all folded up into something alternately rich and bitter. "Slam Dunkie" are Spangler's birthday memories: biscuits made from yellow cake batter, mixed with sea-colored ice cream, served with real Dunkaroos. "Sugarloaf Mountain Sorbet" is another story from Grant's family – roasted bananas in molasses and orange juice combine to create something that tastes a bit like a brandy cocktail, a bit like tropical fruits in the rain, a bit like thunderstorms that you only get in Distance. "Breakfast Club" is Spangler's childhood eating lucky charms and fruity pebbles in front of cartoons, merged with his present-day reality as an accomplished pastry chef who knows and uses the Sicilian flower and herb essence Fiori di Sicilia to make American grain even more fragrant.

Stories served in a cup or a cone. This has been the way of eating in elite restaurants for some time. For example, when San Francisco chef Dominique Crenn creates a dish called the Autobiography of an Oyster, it is understood not only as a dish about the oyster, but also about her memories of her – her story, her narrative, or whatever she calls it, hers "Poetic cuisine".

This is actually a more accurate way of talking about food in my opinion than we were before. There is no purely direct experience of an oyster. You could go to the Pacific coast and eat at the hut near the oyster harvest, or you could eat your oysters at your regulars' table in your favorite old steak house, and those are a great many stories too, even if we don't don't mention them.

Story, biography, narration, dialogue – you can even find that in the vanilla ice cream at Bebe Zito. Because it's not just vanilla. It's Tahitian vanilla with MSG added to both flavor it up and take sides in the MSG wars raging on the internet. (To summarize, MSG is a form of glutamate, a naturally occurring amino acid that your body makes spontaneously. It's naturally present in many foods, including tomatoes and cheese. However, by the 1960s, many Americans claimed that the Chinese were adding the direct addition Food gave them a headache. In 1999, legendary food writer Jeffrey Steingarten asked in a culture-changing essay, "Why doesn't everyone in China have a headache?" Use was instead viewed as disguised anti-Asian racism.)

At Bebe Zito, according to Spangler and Grant, "Vanilla MSG" is an opportunity for the store to tell a story about justice. "All of the xenophobic ideology surrounding MSG is bad for you: I want to get people to think about it," Grant explains. "And I don't want a 'normal' taste on the menu either." It's an interesting story to tell on Bebe Zito's special section of 22nd Street, the band that connects the Wedge Co-op and Tao Natural Foods, two of the most significant remaining successes in the baby boomer health world. But what is a story without conflict?

The bigger story behind Bebe Zito is that Ben Spangler grew up in Maple Grove, the son of a chef father who worked across town, including the Sofitel Hotel, and a mother who was a baker and sometimes worked as a school lunchtime lady. At 17 Spangler got his first kitchen job in a pizzeria and soon climbed to a key role in the Italian sister restaurants Bacio and Zelo, where there were ice machines. "When everyone was sitting and drinking at the bar after work, I thought I was going to make ice cream," he recalls. Many, many experiments followed. Somebody noticed and their name ended up on a long list of stunt food TV contestants. He got calls like: Can you send a video of something cool made from ice cream tomorrow? So he ended up on a few trips to the coast and appearances on food TV. ("I'm still getting calls – Hello, it's The Great American Baking Show. I know it's the middle of summer, but can you take a Yule log tomorrow?")

"When everyone was drinking at the bar after work, I thought I was going to make ice cream."

Ben Spangler

When Spangler heard that World Street Kitchen chef Sameh Wadi was about to hire an inaugural ice maker for Milkjam, he introduced himself and developed some of the city's most hectic cult ice creams, like the cocoa bitter "Black". "I remember the Star Tribune put out a list of the top five ice creams of the year. Two were from me, one from Rustica and one from Milkjam, and my name was nowhere, "Spangler remembers those ambitious years. Then one day, fortune and happiness changed everything through Tinder. Swipe right; Enter Gabriella Grant.

Grant grew up in Eagan – the child of a Brazilian mother who baked wedding cakes at home and a Minnesota-born computer programmer who lived a formative decade in Brazil – of course, she lived and breathed Brazil. She attended art school in Milwaukee growing up Grant and returned home with strong skills in design, branding and creating immersive experiences. Then she met Spangler.

"When we started dating, most of our dates went with ice cream," explains Spangler. "And when I talked to Gabriella, I realized in my heart that I love making ice cream, but I don't want to do it for anyone else; I want to do it for myself. "

Grant says, "It was important for us to create a space where we could tell our story in any way we could." And that is the story behind these cute and creative stories.

Grant is responsible for branding and design. The radical / adorable tattooed Kewpie doll is her vision of the abundantly tattooed Spangler. Spangler is responsible for the sophisticated ice cream construction, going through 20 versions of yellow biscuits to find the right texture for the ice cream and sifting through all of the pistachios in the world to find the ones that sing. (These pistachios are grown under armed guard in Sicily because otherwise the mafia will steal the valuable harvest. But they are worth it. They make an ice cream that is light and nutty and better than any other pistachio ice cream I've ever tasted .)

Spangler has also perfected the burgers that Bebe Zito sells every weekend. They are made to order in a trailer parked behind the ice cream parlor and are great. Crunchy meatballs, sticky gooey cheese, a sweet Hawaiian-style bun – and for $ 5.95 per single, a third of the price of most iconic burgers in town. It deserves the crowd outside and the expansion into a burger spot in Malcolm Yards' Food Hall. This burger also tells a story: Spangler's loyalty is firmly on the side of people who only have $ 10 for dinner and chefs who want to get through their shift without any problems to achieve great things. "When you make one thing, you'll be surprised how much better you can do it," he says. "If more people did one thing, we would have better food."

This thought seems to have caught on in several minds this year. The Nelson's Ice Cream Crew in Stillwater took over the former Izzy's Space on Marshall in St. Paul for one thing: ice cream sandwiches with homemade cookies.

A to Z Creamery has become an internet sensation. Founder and owner Zach Vraa turned his mother's ice cream machine birthday present into an Instagram-based company. Nowadays, he sells 300 to 400 pints of a unique flavor every week to customers on his nearly 10,000-strong mailing list. Follow the Instagram account and you can log in to try a pint of potato chip fudge ice cream or cheese caramel popcorn ice cream.

"I have obsessive fans. I think that's because I do everything from scratch and people get excited when they see the flavors and know they only have one chance, "says Vraa. Weekly lottery winners pick up their pints in St. Louis Park, though he's looking for a stationary location for a possible fall opening.

It's hard not to be surprised that all the kids who were locked at home in the pandemic last year are now going out this summer and trying this new world of original ice cream. What stories will this summer's ice cream eaters turn into their own biographies? And how will these stories and ice creams seep through the art and flow into the ice creams of future summers? This is what the experts call a story without end. And sometimes those are the cutest and the best.

Bebe Zito, 704 W. 22nd St., Mpls., Bebezitomn.com; A to Z Creamery, atozcreamery.com; Nellie's Ice Cream, 2034 Marshall Ave., St. Paul, 651-645-7839, nelliesicecream.com

source https://seapointrealtors.com/2021/08/01/at-bebe-zito-each-ice-cream-tells-a-story/

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