Lovin' spoonful

There's a small - but vehement - group of people in the UAE who feel very strongly. About gelato.

Apparently, there was nowhere in the country serving the real thing - until a few like-minded people put their heads together and opened Bacio Gelato in Al Barsha last month.

The brainchild of interior designer/gelato fanatic Lina Bargash and Bologna-born gelato maestro Cesare Cellie, Bacio serves up the kind of ice cream that people will travel miles for.

Actually, ice cream is kind of a misnomer; as gelato fanatics will tell you, there's a world of difference between the lurid bubblegum-flavours you get in the mall, the long-life supermarket brands and a true gelato, with its fresh ingredients and, most importantly, an unsurpassably creamy texture.

Bacio Gelato is a case in point: Cesare prides himself on freshness, making many of the flavours on a daily basis, especially the fruit flavours. Every morning you'll find him at Lulu hypermarket, picking out the best of the day's fruit - strawberries, mangoes, lemons, melons. If the strawberries that day are no good, then sorry, no fragola for you. He'd rather have it that way than serve bad gelato.

Since he's got about a dozen flavours to choose from, however, it's likely you'll find something special any day you stop in. Of course there's a classic vanilla, although Italians aren't really fans of the plain stuff, says Cesare. But it goes down a treat in my favourite Italian dessert, affogato, or "drowned": a creamy cupful of vanilla with a hot espresso poured over.

Gelato owes its popularity to that smooth texture, which comes from being served at a warmer temperature than regular ice cream and its lower butterfat content - about 10 per cent compared to ice cream's over 20 per cent. All that means it melts faster - and you get all the flavour faster too. Ever notice how really cold things don't really taste of much?

That's not a problem with the slightly warmer gelato. Try the mango, for example: it's fragrant and the smooth texture replicates the feel of a really ripe mango. Or the hazelnut (my personal favourite). The sweet, unmistakable nuttiness shines through with every spoonful, as it does in Bacio (the name, meaning kiss in Italian, refers to a famous brand of chocolate-hazelnut candy), where shards of toasted hazelnut nestle together in a rich chocolate-nut gelato. It's Nutella for grown-ups.