Cold Spell
When it comes to dessert, or dolci, in Italian restaurants, the ubiquitious tiramisu has easily surpassed spumoni in popularity. Plenty of restaurants, such as Tony Ferrara’s, still serve spumoni; though it was originally a frozen blend of sweetened marscapone cheese, rum and candied citron, most of us recognize it as a pink and green ice cream dish, sometimes made with pistachios and served with rum sauce.
For a generation of Americans, spumoni was Italian ice cream until urban street vendors started selling variations of fruit-flavored sorbetto, often called Italian ices or, in Philadelphia, “water ices.” New York native John Khoury and his wife, Angie, a Kansas City transplant, first discovered the treat while living in Philly nearly a decade ago.
“That’s how we survived Philadelphia,” says John. “We ate water ices almost every day.”
When the two moved to Kansas City, they missed the nonfat, preservative-free frozen treat, so they opened the first Angie’s Italian Ice shop, with partner Jay Padden (Angie’s brother) in Shawnee. Last April, they moved the store to a narrow space at 1710 W. 39th Street, selling frozen custard, Chicago-style hot dogs and seven flavors of Italian ice — all made daily with fresh fruit — from a walk-up window.
“The business is much better here,” says John. “It’s really an inner-city neighborhood, and we have regulars who stop by every day. We even have names for some of them, like Rat Boy.”
The flavors change each day, although lemon, mango and passion fruit are constants. The ices last only 36 hours before they turn bitter and have to be tossed out, so Jay constantly mans the giant Electric Freeze machines, creating eight-gallon batches at a time.
The 39th Street store stays open until 10:30 p.m. on weekends. John Khoury and Padden also sell their wares from a trailer at the city market each weekend and have become the official concessionaires for the new Kansas City Mystics women’s soccer team.
Across town at 2535 Independence Avenue, in the oldest Dairy Queen in the city, John McMurray and Esther Saladino McMurray sell the most American of ice cream confections: soft-serve, the silky-smooth stuff that “Sherb” Noble invented in Joliet, Illinois, in 1940. The McMurrays’ store, which opened on July 4, 1952, was the fifth DQ to be built in Kansas City (the first four have since been razed) and was, like Angie’s, just a walk-up window in the beginning.
“I wish it still was,” says Esther, who started her DQ career as this store’s first employee in 1964 and bought the place from its previous owner sixteen years later. Last year the McMurrays added bullet-proof glass and metal screens to the front of the service counter. “The neighborhood is on the upswing,” Esther says, “but you still need security.”
The McMurrays serve all the traditional DQ items — dipped cones, Mister Mistys, Peanut Buster Parfaits — including, Esther says, “items that other Dairy Queen stores dropped years ago. Like the Crunch Cones. And Banana Supremes. We never gave up on them.”
The McMurrays run the store together, seven days a week, closing only from December through March.
“That’s when we travel to Dairy Queen conventions all over the country,” Esther says. “There’s always something new to learn and new products to check out.”
In the ice cream world, cold stuff is always hot.
