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A celebrated Manhattan gelato maker is opening its first Upper East Side location this Friday at 1062 Third Avenue, between 62nd and 63rd Streets, the brand announced on Instagram.
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il laboratorio del gelato, the Lower East Side gelateria founded by Jon Snyder in August 2002, will launch the new shop on May 1, the company announced this week. The new location will rotate through 36 flavors at any given time, all produced at the brand’s longtime Ludlow Street kitchen.Snyder’s path to the freezer case is an unusual one. He spent his childhood summers from age nine working at his grandparents’ Carvel in Cortlandt Manor, discovered Italian gelato as a teenager in Greenwich Village, and co-founded Ciao Bella Gelato Co. in 1984 at age 18. He sold that business five years later, earned a BS and MBA from Columbia, and put in seven years on Wall Street before returning to frozen desserts and opening the Ludlow Street flagship.
Depth of selection has long been the brand’s calling card — Narratively once profiled the operation under the title “The 300 Flavors in Jon Snyder’s Mind.” Beyond pistachio and stracciatella, the rotation regularly pulls from categories most ice cream shops don’t bother with: cheddar, olive oil, beet, sweet potato, wasabi, mastic, guinness, and a Yemeni spice blend called hawaij. Pistachios and almonds are roasted in-house, and fruit is juiced, peeled, pitted, or cored from scratch in small batches.
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The 1,200-square-foot Third Avenue space — most recently asking $300,000 per year, as we noted in July when the lease was first publicized by TradedNY — was previously home to Footlight Shoes for three decades, the family-run footwear shop that closed in 2023.In addition to the Ludlow Street original and the new Lenox Hill outpost, the company operates shops in Hoboken, Upper Montclair, and Shanghai. The brand has been featured by the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bon Appetit, and CNBC, among others.
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