When Bacio di Latte opened a tiny gelato counter in São Paulo in 2011, there was no obvious reason it should have worked: two young Italians, far from home, making traditional Italian gelato in a city that didn’t yet have much use for the distinction between gelato and ice cream. Fifteen years later, that distinction is exactly what the brand is now teaching American customers, one store at a time, from California to a long-awaited debut in New York.
Brothers Edoardo and Luigi Tonolli grew up around a family gelato business in Italy and moved to Brazil determined to do it properly: slow-churned in small batches, dense and creamy rather than airy, built from real fruit, nuts and dairy rather than the syrups and stabilizers that pass for ice cream on most corners. Their first shop opened on Rua Oscar Freire, a boutique-lined street in São Paulo better known for Brazilian fashion labels than for dessert — not the obvious place to bet on gelato, but exactly the kind of neighborhood that notices when something is done right.
That attention to ingredients has stayed the brand’s signature as it has grown into one of Brazil’s best-known gelato names, with more than 240 stores and its branded pints sold in thousands of supermarkets. The sourcing list reads like a shopping trip across two continents: Sicilian pistachios, hazelnuts from Piedmont and Belgian chocolate sit alongside Amazonian cocoa, dulce de leche from Uruguay and strawberries grown in southern Minas Gerais. Passion fruit, a fruit native to Brazil, gets its own spotlight too, in a silky Creme de Maracujá and in limited-edition flavors pairing it with chocolate. Franchising, meanwhile, has never been part of the plan: every store is company-run, so the gelato tastes the same whether it’s scooped in São Paulo or New York.
Beverly Hills was where the brand first tested the American market, back in 2017, growing quietly from there across California before this year brought a second Santa Monica location and, this fall, its first store in New York’s West Village, with San Francisco, San Diego and Phoenix also on the way. Getting there has meant reading American taste as closely as Brazilian taste: pistachio, the top seller back home, barely moves in the U.S., where customers reach instead for anything built around cookies, so the gelato itself has been quietly adjusted with a touch more cream to suit the American palate.
It’s a reminder that the ingredients matter as much as the passport. Bacio di Latte didn’t travel to the United States by diluting what made it Brazilian, or Italian, for that matter. It traveled by refusing to compromise, flavor by flavor, store by store, on the thing that got it noticed on a side street in São Paulo in the first place: gelato made properly.
