Cone my gelato — and my pizza

[attach]5100[/attach]When Eli Turkienicz took over the Mad Italian he tried to think of what would sell during the winter months when gelato sales are down.

“You have ice cream in a cone, well what else can you put in a cone?” he says. “So I thought what about putting pizza in a cone, pizza toppings and stuff.”

Upon further investigation online he discovered a similar dish didn’t exist in the city and decided to introduce his Zazzu hot cones at the Baking and Sweets Show. Since all 75 hot cones sold on the first day he decided to bring 120 along the next morning and still wound up selling out.

“Sunday we knew was going to be really busy since the Cake Boss was coming so we brought in 250 cones and we sold out in two hours,” he says. “There was a line up around the corner down the hall and when we ran out we were actually scared.”

The pizzas in the shape of ice cream cones, which come in pepperoni, meatball, vegetarian and margherita, are made to order at his shops on Bayview Avenue near Manor Road East and on College Street near Bathurst Street.

Before Turkienicz took over the gelato bars last spring, he previously worked in real estate but says food had always been one of his passions.

“I just reached a point in my life where I wanted to actually pursue my dream and so I said okay let’s see what I can do,” he says.

After he decided to expand into the gelato industry, he discovered Mad Italian’s founder Alessandro Settimi was looking to sell the business.

“We had very similar mindsets in terms of how we wanted things to progress so it wasn’t hard for him to turn over something he had created and was proud of and rightfully so,” he says. “I’ve taken it over and I’m continuing with the tradition they started but bringing in my own concepts.”

Turkienicz and vice-president and consultant Joel Friedman are currently in the process of looking for a third location as well as building a franchise model.

“We have a really good gelato that comes from Italy, handed down from a number of generations from this family in Rome,” he says. “We’ve been told time and time again ‘I haven’t had gelato like this since I was in Italy’ and that makes me feel really good and really proud of the product that we’re putting out there.”

Although he’s only been working at the Bayview storefront for a short while, he says he already knows many patrons on a first name basis.

“I love the community spirit in this location, it’s really wonderful,” he says. “I want them to feel that they had a taste of what authentic gelato is like and to know that there’s a place they can come to relax and have a coffee and let the world go by.”