My pickiness about pistachio ice cream is a family legend. For as long as I can remember, I loved the artificially green Baskin-Robbins version of the flavor. One fatal day, an imposter came to call. Here’s your pistachio ice cream, my parents said. NO, I yelled, refusing to even taste the all-natural Ben & Jerry’s pale imitation of my glorious green.
The spumoni at L&B Spumoni Gardens would’ve delighted my four-year-old self. Though it does contain real nuts, the pistachio spumoni has a nice vibrant green color, intermixed with the more humdrum vanilla and chocolate. But I’ve grown up just a little in the intervening years, and that green, green ice cream is not what makes Spumoni Gardens so great.
Nope. It’s the pizza. Now, I should admit that I’ve been known to offend friends and enemies with the assertion that there are no truly bad pizzas, and no truly great ones either. I mean, I don’t dream of pizza from Domino’s, but I wouldn’t turn it down. And on the other hand, I’ve sometimes disparaged illustrious pies, as I will perhaps detail here one day. (Sorry, Di Fara, Franny’s: I really appreciate you guys now, I swear.) But I do have to concede that some pizza is much better than others. And Spumoni Gardens’s Sicilian slice falls squarely (yep, that’s right) into the “better” category.
L&B Spumoni Gardens, 2725 86th Street, Bensonhurst
qedestrian 