One lunchtime, a few weeks into the first lockdown of 2020, a customer came into Caliendo’s Gelato in London’s Kentish Town, bubbling with excitement. “I asked her how long she’d been waiting,” says Michelina Caliendo-Sear who, with her partner, Fiona Bell, had opened the ice-cream parlour in December of 2019. “She said over half an hour. I went to the back door and looked out.” Customers were queueing right round the corner and far up the sidestreet. They were clearly prepared to wait a very long time indeed for scoops of blackcurrant and liquorice or fig and walnut and, most of all, for the famed Bronte pistachio, made with prestige nuts harvested from the very foothills of Mount Etna. “We were their treat at the end of their lockdown walk. That was when I knew the business was going to be OK,” Caliendo-Sear says.
In May, Caliendo’s was named the first ice-cream parlour of the year, in a competition run by the Ice Cream Alliance, which represents hundreds of parlours and producers. “We are honoured and proud to have won,” Caliendo-Sear says, “especially among such stiff competition.” She’s not wrong. The fact is that ice-cream – a broad term that can cover everything from hard scoop to gelato, soft serve to kulfi, dondurma to sorbet, frozen yoghurt and so much more – is having a moment. You could say that right now, ice-cream is hot. In 2022, the value of the UK sector rose by 6% to £1.7bn. While tough trading conditions recently have taken their toll, before the pandemic the number of dedicated ice-cream parlours was rising by 20% a year. Nearly two-thirds of all ice-cream manufacturers operating today have been incorporated only since 2015.
