Angelo Brocato Ice Cream

The cannoli are the reason to queue. Shells are made from scratch, filled with chocolate cream at one end and vanilla at the other, dipped in pistachio and dusted with powdered sugar, and the recipe has been in the same family since Angelo Brocato opened his New Orleans parlor in 1905.

A Sicilian dessert counter, not a coffeehouse

The order runs to Italian ice cream, gelato, pastry and old-line Sicilian sweets. The signature list is short and specific: Cannoli Siciliana, Spumoni, the house gelato, Bisquit Tortoni and assorted biscotti.

The spumoni is the most precise of them, layered from pistachio almond, tutti frutti and lemon and finished with almond whipped cream. Alongside it sit biscotti, tortoni and the dessert trays associated with Sicilian family occasions and Sunday dinners, which is the register the whole counter works in.

A hundred and twenty years, and one flood

Angelo Brocato was born in Cefalù, apprenticed in Palermo and opened a small ice cream store in the United States before establishing the New Orleans parlor. After his death in 1946 the business carried on through his wife and children and later through Angelo Brocato, Jr. and Arthur Brocato. The Mid-City chapter began when the family bought the current shop in 1978.

The older French Quarter shop is remembered for the smell of fresh cannoli at the door and Sicilian families filling the line. The present parlor keeps that thread, down to the classic neon reading A. Brocato Spumone and Cassata Ice Cream. Its hardest moment came after Hurricane Katrina, when flooding severely damaged the shop; the reopening in September 2006 became one of the markers of Mid-City's recovery.

Order the cannoli, then the spumoni

Start with the cannoli, because it concentrates the shop's Sicilian pastry story into one item: homemade shell, chocolate and vanilla cream, pistachio and powdered sugar.

Then order the spumoni for the clearest ice cream signature, with pistachio almond, tutti frutti, lemon and almond whipped cream in the same dish. Gelato, Bisquit Tortoni and biscotti round out a counter order if the goal is to taste beyond a single cup or cone. The standing is not only nostalgic: in 2007 the staff and owners received the Lafcadio Hearn Award from the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University, and in 2023 Angelo Brocato was a James Beard Award semifinalist for outstanding bakery.