Italian Ice Cream

The Clifton Hill end of Niagara Falls runs on novelty — wax museums, haunted houses, the engineered noise of the Falls Avenue strip. Just off it, on Victoria Avenue, Italian Ice Cream trades in something quieter: a gelato case the Vergalito family has filled from its own recipe for decades, with no debt to the attraction economy next door. The gelato is made in house, two dozen flavours at a time, and the family has worked through close to a hundred of them over the years.

What sets the case apart is the line the kitchen draws between its frozen styles. The milk-base gelato is the heart of it, churned in house from the family recipe — pistachio is the cleanest read on what the Vergalitos do, with hazelnut close behind and tiramisu and chocolate brownie holding down the Italian side. The fruit ices run on a different chemistry: lemon, mango, and raspberry built on water rather than milk, fat free and brighter on the tongue. The flavour board is not fixed, either; it rotates through a deep back catalogue the family has built up over the decades, so a return visit rarely reads exactly like the last one.

Past the scoops, the gelato turns into composed desserts. An affogato pours hot espresso over torrone and hazelnut gelato, then finishes it with chocolate, whipped cream, and a lady finger. A cioccolato doubles down with chocolate ice cream under chocolate sauce; an amarena coppa layers vanilla and chocolate ice cream with candied amarena cherries; a fragola does the same with strawberry; and a lemon raspberry mini torte gives a table a plated, individual finish. The tartufo is the showpiece — a single gelato ball buried under whipped cream and a scatter of amarena cherries.

The breadth past dessert is what makes this a cafe and not a scoop counter. The coffee leans grown-up: espresso and cappuccino at the plain end, then a caffè corretto cut with sambuca, brandy, or grappa, plus Irish, Spanish, and B-52 versions for an after-dinner table. The panini keep it open through the middle of the day — prosciutto or genoa salami on ciabatta with provolone, a veggie build, a tuna — so a visit can start savoury before it turns to sugar. The shop is licensed and keeps a patio, which makes it as workable for a slow afternoon coffee as for a cone grabbed on the way past. None of it crowds the gelato; it just gives the place more than one reason to be open.

The continuity behind all of it is not a marketing line. Joe and Anna Vergalito opened the shop in 1978 and built it as a family business, and the family still runs it — local reporting names Andrew Vergalito as the current owner. The recipe, the in-house production, and the rotating set of flavours have carried across that whole span without leaving the family's hands. What regulars tend to mention first is the welcome — counter service that still runs warm and unhurried, the texture of a shop that has never been run by anyone but the Vergalitos.

What ties the visit together is how easily the shop bends to the occasion. A cone or a fruit ice covers the walk-by, a panini and a coffee make it lunch, the patio handles the slow afternoon, and a take-home container — two flavours to a tub — carries the gelato back to the hotel or the cottage. The made-to-order gelato cakes are the version that takes real planning: a size and one or two flavours chosen in advance, peanut-free, finished with real whipped cream, and ordered at least two days out, with pairings like chocolate and hazelnut or strawberry and banana. It is the same gelato case, asked to do birthday work. For a shop a few steps off the busiest tourist strip in the country, the surprising part is how much of its trade is the unhurried, planned-ahead kind.