After months of anticipation that had the neighbourhood buzzing, Stella Luna Gelato Café will open this weekend in Old Ottawa South. Armed with her adventurous spirit, her adopted Italian background, and a lot of courage, owner Tammy Giuliani has finally decided to follow her dream and open a gelateria.
“It’s a leap of faith! I’m in my mid-forties, my husband is in his early fifties… to be starting anew at this age… it’s scary!” she said.
This isn’t the first leap Giuliani and her husband have taken. When you ask her how she fell in love with gelato, you get a story to rival Eat, Pray, Love. In 1985, the summer she was 19, she took off to explore Italy. Three days into her trip, lost in Rome without a word of Italian, she bumped into a hottie on a Ducati. After mere days together, he proposed.
“We met, he asked me to the movies, and on the third day on the Spanish Steps, we were having a pizza and he proposed, and I thought, ‘How can I do this? How can I pick up and leave and marry you?’” she said, smiling. “And his comment, in very broken English, I spoke no Italian and he said, ‘You North Americans have your feet planted on the ground. You need to pick up your feet and fly.’ So I flew home, packed my bags and moved to Italy.”
In her years in Italy, she ate plenty of gelato, and when she moved back to Canada with her husband to raise their family, she dreamed of opening her own gelateria. The opportunity came when the Waldorf school she worked at closed during the economic downturn.
“Instead of jumping right into a next job, I took the opportunity to step back and thought, what would I like to do?” she said. She chose to follow her passion.
After a months-long master class at the gelato university in Bologna, Italy, she had the skills, and chose Old Ottawa South because it’s her family’s heart. She lived here with her kids when they were small and her grandmother grew up on Sunnyside and remembers when the Dollar-It was the Coulter’s Drug store (this was during the Great Depression).
The gelateria will be a real family business, with her husband as her right-hand man and her kids hanging out after school. She wants to build a community around the store, like the gelaterias she knew back in Italy.
“I’m a big believer in a strong community. That’s my dream, to create a hang out spot, that hearth of the neighborhood.” She wants to host open mike nights, display art, even invite student musicians from Canterbury (where he kids attend school) to give shows.
And with all this will be top-notch, artisan gelato. Forgoing pre-packaged mixes, she’ll use her training and work with local ingredients whenever possible to create fresh, flavourful gelato. Her Italian family will send word of the latest gelato trends in Rome. Some of her recipes were handed down to her from her mentors, a family of Italian gelato makers since the 1800s.
“I’ve always shared a passion for something that’s well-made, well-prepared, simple ingredients but, something that’s wholesome and genuine,” she said. “So I wanted to make sure what I was offering was exactly that.”
“When something is your passion, it’s not a job. It’s not like getting up and going to work every day.”
Stella Luna Gelateria opens July 31st at 1103 Bank Street. The first batch of gelato they’ve made is Pistachio. Learn more at http://slgelato.com/.
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