What You See is What You Eat.

This has to be one of the reasons why ANSWER LA chose Silverlake to host Saturday’s anti-Prop. 8 protest: food. If we were in the eastiest of East LA, where would we go? It hasn’t been gentrified yet.  Too scary.

So, after marching from Sunset Junction, down Virgil, right on Santa Monica (at which point the guy holding the “GAY IS THE NEW BLACK” sign behind me said, “FINALLY! Where it matters!!”), right on Vermont, and then right back onto Sunset again (the breakaway crowd that tried heading towards Hollywood were sadly cut off – but then again, Hollywood was sooo day-after-the-election), back to where we started.  We led a breakaway crowd to get coffee at Intelligentsia. It is very tiring, this protesting business. We sat down and were engaging in some Prop 8 banter when a line of 5 or 6 squad cars tried to break up the protest. We managed to get them all to back up and out slowly, in the same straight line they were in when they rolled up.  This was considered a big victory for everyone.  Certainly for the Martha Stewarts in the crowd.  Such a victory that we returned to the safety of our coffees and decided to go across the street to Pazzo Gelato for, of course, gelato.

Know the difference between gelato and ice cream?  Gelato has no air whipped into it; ice cream has lots.  According to this, almost half of your ice cream carton may be air!  

So many flavors, so little time to try them all. This does not stop most people, least of all me. Important decisions like this require equal consideration of all options. The people here are always happy to let you try everything, without a hint of impatience about it. So nice.

I also like that when you ask to try two flavors, they put one flavor on one side of the spoon and the other flavor on the other side. It’s so wasteful otherwise. Speaking of spoons, why do we eat gelato with those shovels? Hm, I ate a cup of gelato with a spoon once, and it felt so odd, so … American. Maybe licking spoon shovels makes us feel Italian. I don’t know.

Scoops over on Melrose and Heliotrope has crazy creative flavors – brown bread gelato, wasabi gelato, Guinness gelato, etc. Pazzo’s emphasis is less on “What is the weirdest thing we can do with the items in our cupboards?” and more on “How can we combine, simply, these things you will find at Whole Foods or Bristol Farms?” This means you get flavors like creme fraiche, marscapone, chevre with farm fresh raspberries. This also means: WOW!

We tasted as much as we could, and ended up with a small cup of gelato.  A small cup garners you two scoops.  After a lot of contemplation over the flavors (some flavors, like the limoncello, tasted great, but more as an individual flavor and less as a flavor that complements another flavor.  There is an art to choosing flavors that will go well together, sort of like choosing your significant other.)  We ultimately chose creme fraiche and hazelnut chocolate.  $3.95.  

The creme fraiche tastes like what Pinkberry stands for: tangy, but still slightly sweet.  Really good, but don’t think I’d get this again – a little too tangy for me.  The tangy was counterbalanced by the sweet of the hazelnut chocolate, but overall, they were too different to really meld together. Like Cher and Sonny Bono. Oh, well.  Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t.

I remember the day when Pazzo just opened and I walked in, really skeptical, because I’m Euro-arrogant and say to people, I’ve been to Giolitti’s in Rome and that is GELATO. At most gelato places, I try it and get disappointed. Most often the problem is that it tastes much too much like ice cream and if that is the case, I’d rather be at Ben and Jerry’s. So, I don’t generally go back to most gelato places. But Pazzo — not as great as Giolitti’s, but still damn good. It tastes like gelato proper: creamier, denser than regular ice cream. It feels light despite the lack of whipped air; you feel refreshed instead of full; your palate is cleansed and you have finished the eating on a high point.

Price runs a tad on the expensive side – geesh, I remember when it was just under $3 for a small when it first opened – but in moderation, that is the way to go. Especially after a good round of protesting.

Next rally and march is at City Hall on Saturday at 10:30am. I am bringing the dog. But, wait, oh no! Where will we eat??

Pazzo Gelato (It says “Full website coming soon” but this is how it’s been since at least a year ago)
3827 Sunset
Sun – Thu 11-11
Fri – Sat 11 – midnight
During the summer, the lines are out the door, even at 11pm on a weekday. I know, don’t people have jobs in this town?!