Depending on what's available, Spangaro might make prickly pear gelato or tequila lime sorbet. Organic yogurt gelato requires him to cook a special base just for that flavor, but the result is worth it — the taste and texture put ordinary frozen yogurt to shame.
And for private customers, Spangaro's gone even more exotic, whipping up gelato with champagne, Jack Daniel's (with more than a liter and a half in one pan), or red Zinfandel grapes from a friend's Napa Valley estate. One time, he even made a decadent gelato using white truffles from Alba. The delicacies are available only from December to February, and this year, they ran about $1,800 a pound. He sold it by the pan, but if he'd sold it by the scoop, it would've been 10 or 12 dollars apiece.
Peter Scanlon
A drizzle of warm, homemade chocolate sauce.
Peter Scanlon
Sculptural fruit carvings are conspicuously absent.
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Right now, Spangaro's in the process of getting copyrights for his gelato base recipes. He could make a fortune on them if he wanted to, but he'd rather protect them than sell them. Although he wouldn't rule out franchising if his high standards could be maintained, at the moment, his plan is to start training a young man to make gelato this summer, in the hopes of opening a second shop next year. They've been talking about it since before Spangaro even opened Arlecchino.
Plenty of people have offered to work for him for free, but he's extremely wary. "I know where they're coming from," he says. There also have been a few incidents of people asking employees very specific, technical questions about how Spangaro makes his gelato.
A few months after Arlecchino opened, somebody broke into the shop and tried to steal the recipes. They didn't actually take anything off the premises; instead, they lined up dozens of pages of Spangaro's notes — all in Italian — and, apparently, took photos of them. (Turns out, the notes did not include the recipes.)
Two weeks after the break-in, someone tried to burglarize Spangaro's maestro's place in Italy, he says, but again, there were no recipes to steal. Then, a couple of months later, the "technician" arrived at Arlecchino.
"He said, 'It'll only take a couple of minutes.' This was a five-month-old machine at that point," Spangaro says. "My employee called me, and I said, 'I'm gonna be right there.' It took me less than two minutes to get there because I live in an apartment building across the street - and I ran. He left 10 seconds before I got there."
Thankfully, nothing shady has happened since. A more typical scenario these days — now that word's out on Arlecchino — is admirers coming in to negotiate with Spangaro. Or to try, at least.
One customer, who owns some buildings in Tokyo, and has tried gelato all over the world, comes to Phoenix a few times a year. He makes Spangaro an offer every time he visits. If he agreed to it, Spangaro could get his own shop and a very large amount of money — but the catch is, he'd have to move to Tokyo.
For now, he says he's not interested in the least. Let's hope he never changes his mind.
