Piattini Gelateria and Match mini burgers

It’s Reading Period! I granted myself a free day wander down Boston’s beautiful Newbury Street, visit some fabulous friends, and eat some junk food… because I deserve it.

I have a good relationship with gelato. We’ve gotten along thus far – I had some truly makes-your-mouth-sing gelato on my brief stopovers in Rome and Paris. (Not as glam as it sounds, I was on a rowdy Topdeck tour that produced utterly cookie-cutter photo-op travel experieces.) I still fantasize about those heavenly fig and honey concoctions that I ate two years ago. So I was looking forward to some inventive varieties.

I saw recently opened Piattini Gelateria and Cafe and decided to give it a try. The super sweet waiter patiently explained every single flavor on the menu (rosemary honey, turkish coffee, fior de latte, thai coconut milk, chocolato scuro, frutti de bosco. And the sorbets were grape, mojito, limone, and pesca).

I sampled a chocolate with hazelnuts that wasn’t on the menu, which was so intensely rich that I decided on spoonful was enough. Rosemary honey felt like chugging floral-scented lotion, so that was a pass. Fior de latte (Amish milk) had the “lightness of vanilla without the vanilla flavor” – it seemed more like a fluffy absence of flavor than a flavor.

At an impasse, I gave thai coconut milk and mojito sorbet a go.

I think the major weakness of the gelato was that it wasn’t very cold – by the time I ate it, it had become soft and a bit melted. It also had a lot more air that I would normally expect. It seemed that chocolate flavors are you best bet here. I had been hoping for something deliriously coconutty, but rather, it was seemed more like run of the milk coconut ice cream.

The mojito had a nice sour, puckery note and icier, grainier texture of sorbet worked well with the flavors.

The bill for this small dish came out to $4.82. Plus tip, this ended up costing me about $6. My credit card felt a little sad.

I wish you had been a more transcendental $6 spent.

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