Cronulla Cool

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday January 24, 2006

Helen Greenwood

Frangipani Gelato Bar

1/2 OCEAN GROVE AVENUE, CRONULLA, 9544 0216

The perfect way to chill out in the Shire is with homemade gelato.

In the heat of summer, there's no such thing as too much ice-cream. So it's off to Cronulla to visit one of the few women in the gelato business, Diana Kontoprias.

The sign on the Cronulla RSL club says "business as usual". It's a positive spin on a tough situation. Business has been bad in the suburb since the "troubles", as Kontoprias calls the events of last month.

She says business slumped after December 11 and even now she is trading 30 per cent below what she would normally expect at this time of year.

"It dropped off in the three weeks after the troubles," she says. "Shops were closing in the early afternoon. Then all the local businesses got together and thought, it's wrong to close because we are being spooked. We have to try to be as normal as possible to bring people back and have confidence in the area."

The locals didn't stop buying Kontoprias's made-on-the-premises product. "They were fantastic; they made the effort to come into the shop and say 'We are out here to show support'. They are disgusted with what happened. [The rioters] are only one group of many in the area."

You'll find Kontoprias in a side street between the beach and the mall. Once beach-goers stumble across her, looking for something to eat, "I consider them mine", she says. "They'll come back time and time again and bring their friends. There are people from Penrith who come here on a regular basis."

Some customers are loyal all year round, such as the woman who buys pistachio, banana and coconut scoops every night. They are three of the 28 flavours that Kontoprias has on display at any one time.

The 35-year-old is a self-taught gelato-maker. She picked up her skills living in Italy and working for a year in a gelateria. She was on a seven-year working and travelling odyssey through Europe that began in Greece, where her parents were born.

She returned to Sydney in 2001, unable to imagine going back to accounting and a nine-to-five job. Then she noticed the buzz about gelato. In 2002 Gelato Messina and Gelatissimo opened their first shops. She followed soon after.

She did well immediately. She has an excellent product - the cassata is really something - and knows what her customers want.

"Caramel and chocolate flavours sell well," she says, as do butterscotch and custard with toffee apple. She experiments with ideas she has picked up from magazines or dessert menus.

Her counters are divided into fruit gelato and sorbets - she has an organic blood orange at the moment, a very lemonadey lemon, and a lovely cinnamon and fig, as well as richer offerings such as choc-orange, hazelnut-chocolate and cookies and cream.

Her wholesale side is getting bigger and she wants it to grow further because it keeps her buoyant in the down season. "People will order ice-cream in a restaurant no matter what the weather is outside."

Open

Daily 10am-10.30pm

Best buys

Chocolate-hazelnut gelato $3.40/150g scoop

Cookies-and-cream gelato $3.40/150g scoop

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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