120 YEARS LATER, GELATO LEGEND ANGELO BROCATO’S STILL RULES SUMMER IN NEW ORLEANS

Generations of New Orleanians with sweet tooths have looked up at a brown and neon sign flashing the words “A. Brocato Spumone and Cassata Ice Cream” against a stark blue sky. Eventually, those visiting duck under a red-striped awning to peruse cookies, tarts, and gelato in glass display cases while waiting their turns in a line that often meanders onto Carrollton Avenue.

Their chosen treat — a fresh cannoli or a wedge of the shop’s iconic spumoni — is always proffered on a small white plate lined with a crisp doily, perhaps served with a cup of cafe au lait from the piston-operated espresso machine, fashioned from copper and brass, that sits behind the counter. These touches hearken back to a different time, and nod to the Italian immigrants who have shaped the culinary scene of New Orleans, a sweltering delta city with an affinity for cool, refreshing treats.

New Orleanians and tourists credit those Italian immigrants with the introduction of muffuletta sandwiches and red gravy — the city’s take on tomato sauce — to the local food repertoire. Although old-school Creole Italian restaurants like Liuzza’s Restaurant & Bar, Pascal’s Manale, and Mandina’s Restaurant have served traditional dishes across the decades, and newer restaurants, including Domenica and Josephine Estelle, have made their names on modern Italian fare, Angelo Brocato has proudly represented the community by excelling at one thing for the past 119 years: dessert.

The New Orleans roots of Arthur Brocato, the parlor’s current owner, can be traced to the turn of the 20th century. His grandfather, Angelo Sr., founded the business after moving to New Orleans from Sicily to work on a sugarcane plantation in 1901, at age 26. Angelo Sr. never planned to cut sugarcane long-term — he used the job as a stepping stone to save money before opening his shop on Ursulines Street in the French Quarter in 1905.

In the Sicilian capital of Palermo, Brocato had apprenticed at gelaterias and pasticcerias, and he applied the skills he’d learned there, whipping up cannoli and torroncino (a vanilla gelato laced with almond and cinnamon). Tragedy struck not long after he opened his parlor: His wife, Elisabetta Campora Brocato, succumbed to yellow fever in the city’s 1905 outbreak, leaving him to care for two young children. He met his next wife, Michelina Brocato Brocato, on a trip to Italy soon afterward — together, they grew their family and the parlor.

Eventually, the business outgrew its storefront, and Brocato moved it to a new spot on Ursulines Street in 1921. There, with a little more time and money on his hands, he sought to emulate the Mediterranean ice cream parlors of his youth; one feature included the installation of mosaic tiles on the sidewalk that read, “ANGELO BROCATO.” The business initially catered to the neighborhood’s Sicilian population, but, as New Orleanians from other parts of the city gradually heard about its sweets, they ventured out to taste for themselves. “That’s how it all started,” Arthur says.

Angelo Brocato Sr. was one of many Italian immigrants to land in New Orleans by the early 1900s. When Spain took control of Louisiana for nearly four decades at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, Italians first arrived as members of the Spanish military, then as sailors, according to the Louisiana Folklife Program. By the 1830s, many Sicilian immigrants began to arrive, following the trade routes of the lemons that New Orleans imported from the Mediterranean region. Some came for agricultural work on plantations, while others peddled fruit and ran the docks, eventually coming to dominate the city’s fruit trade.

By the 1880s, the American South was facing an acute labor shortage, as Black Americans left the region to find work in Northern states following the end of the Civil War in 1865. Italian immigrants helped to fill in in their stead, fleeing their homeland’s economic woes in search of prosperity. The state offered parallels to their lives in their native country, given the prevalence of Catholicism and the influence of the same colonizers: Spain and France. They steadily built a community in New Orleans’s French Quarter, which became a kind of “Little Italy.”

Over the years, New Orleans’s Sicilian community has made an indelible mark on the city’s food culture. Italian immigrants are lauded for integrating pasta, garlic, onion, and celery into New Orleanian cooking. Salvatore Lupo, a Sicilian immigrant who opened Central Grocery on Decatur Street in 1906, is largely credited with the creation of the muffuletta, a sandwich featuring cold-cut meats like capicola and ham, cheese, and olive salad layered between slices of homemade bread. And although red sauce was popularized by Italian Americans across the U.S., immigrants in New Orleans put their own twist on it — the Crescent City’s red gravy is made sweeter and simpler than the standard.

Angelo Brocato Sr. served the same cannoli he’d learned to make in Sicily, whipping up a freshly made, whole-curd ricotta filling. He offered it in the winter as a seasonal delicacy, peddling granita al limone, or Italian lemon ice, in the summer. Eaten with Italian bread from street vendors, it refreshed customers at breakfast time during Louisiana summers before air conditioning became prevalent. Made of fresh fruit, sugar and water, the lemon ice is both sweet and dazzlingly tart.

The present-day parlor at 214 N Carrollton Avenue uses Angelo Brocato Sr.’s original cannoli recipe, though it’s now sold year-round, as is the Italian ice. It’s one of the shop’s most popular products — the team makes more than 500,000 annually. Available in regular or miniature sizes, the cannoli are usually stuffed with vanilla filling on one side, chocolate filling on the other. The ends are dipped in pistachio nuts, and sprinkled with powdered sugar. “Everything is made from scratch,” Brocato says, including the shells.

Even as the parlor thrived during its first few decades in business, the Brocatos faced hardship in their new New Orleanian home. Anti-Italian prejudice permeated the newspapers and Catholic churches burned across the country as immigrants were scapegoated for “taking American jobs” during the economic depression of the late 19th century, according to the Library of Congress. In one of the period’s bloodiest attacks on Italian immigrants, 11 Sicilian Americans were lynched in New Orleans in 1891, after being wrongfully accused of murdering the city’s chief of police. In the 1920s, lawmakers took steps to curb immigration in the U.S., and “the great era of Italian immigration came to an end.”

During the Great Depression, Angelo Brocato Sr.’s business survived off of around $7.50 in sales each day, grappling with a shortage of sugar and oils. Later, when World War II began, “there was a lot of resentment [toward] the Italian Americans,” Brocato says, as the country had joined the Axis powers. His grandparents hung red, white, and blue decorations around the shop, with a photo of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt placed front and center, to demonstrate their patriotism. “Those early years were difficult, but they persevered,” Brocato says.

Arthur Brocato’s father, Angelo Jr., and his mother, Mary LoCicero, both full-blooded Sicilian Americans, grew up together in the French Quarter — Mary worked at the store as a waitress at 15 years old. When Angelo Sr. passed away in 1946, Angelo Jr. and his brother, Joseph, ran the parlor as a two-man operation. Italian-owned grocery stores started carrying jars of the Brocatos’ biscotti regina, or sesame seed cookies, which bolstered the shop’s reputation.

The city’s Italian population had begun dispersing throughout the metro area, as younger generations became more assimilated to American and New Orleanian culture. However, even as the community evolved, the Brocatos kept alive a traditional dessert from southern Italy that isn’t often made anymore, due to its labor intensity: spumoni. It consists of three layers of gelato — pistachio, tutti-frutti, and lemon — with an almond cream. It’s first formed in a mold, then sliced by hand and wrapped into individual pieces.

Arthur remembers learning how to slice and wrap spumoni himself as a kid before his father trained him in as a sweet-maker at age 19. Throughout his youth, he spent a lot of time in the store, juicing fruit and sweeping as his father and uncle managed the business. After his uncle retired in late 1972, Arthur stepped up to work with his dad, balancing college classes with his responsibilities at the shop.

Arthur met his wife, Jolie, on a blind date, and she soon joined the team, working Saturday evenings at the store early into their relationship. (“She’s been working with me side-by-side ever since we met,” Brocato says.) In 1979, they moved the shop to its current location in Mid-City. The couple has faced their own challenges: In the 1980s, the state’s oil industry crashed. As companies moved away and residents lost their jobs, Louisianians struggled through a “mini depression,” Brocato says. It lasted longer than they expected — until about 1991. However, the shop gradually rebounded, and business boomed again through much of the decade.

Then, in 2005, came Hurricane Katrina, just one month after the store’s 100th anniversary. As the storm approached, Brocato made his usual preparations, but expected it to divert away from Louisiana. The night before the storm hit, though, the family made a last-minute decision to evacuate to Houston, traveling through the darkness. They wouldn’t return to New Orleans, which had been ravaged by the storm, until late September — about a month after they’d left the city. Not only did his store suffer six feet of flooding, but water had caused mold to grow in his house. In those tense days, Brocato remembers wondering if the city would ever return to its previous vibrancy.

For 13 months, the business was closed. The family considered reopening in a different city, looking at Houston and Baton Rouge as potential options — but neither felt right. In the end, New Orleans called them home. The community banded together to rebuild: Locals helped the Brocatos salvage mixers, ice cream machines, chairs, and tables. For six months, a small bakery across town let them use its facility to bake biscotti regina and cuccidati, Italian fig cookies. “There was a lot that we had to do, and a lot that was able to be redone, thankfully,” Brocato says. Once the shop reopened in September 2006, “we just had lines of people,” he says.

More than a decade later, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the shop to fully close for one month. As a new pandemic-era normal was established, Brocato’s slowly transitioned from takeout orders and drive-thru pickup to outdoor seating and indoor capacity limits. “We had to get creative, you know?” Brocato says. “We survived. We’re glad that part was over.”

Today, as Brocato’s team of 30 buzzes around the business, he can usually be found working with the 10 employees on the production side of the bakery and ice creamery, overseeing batches of sweets and troubleshooting machinery. He’s also mentoring his great-nephew and nephew-in-law to carry on the family business. Looking toward the years ahead of him, Brocato has “hope for the future,” he says.

2024-05-07T19:03:43Z dg43tfdfdgfd