“Someone finally understood this plate!” shouts the photographer.
Photo: Photo: Christian Metzler
Now it’s finally getting warm again, say people who study weather forecasts. Spring in real life, so to speak, April has been defeated and as a reward you sit down in an ice cream parlor and order a Pinocchio ice cream plate. It’s actually intended for children, like the slide in the outdoor pool that adults also use: a bit inappropriate, but sometimes great. There is a very entertaining study about the effect that the photographer Christian Metzler and the writer Leonhard Hieronymi carried out. They received a budget of 1,000 euros from Manfred Rothenberger, the head of Starfruit Publishing, and used it to drive 2,500 kilometers through Germany in a BMW for nine days during the pandemic in June 2021 and test 91 Pinocchio ice cream sundaes in 125 ice cream parlors. Some shops can’t or don’t want to offer it anymore because the children would now demand something else, for example Maya the Bee ice cream. Do you even know who Pinocchio is? In any case, you will feel the power of sugar, which is concentrated in this ice cream variation in a way that is rarely offered anywhere else.
The best Pinocchio was at the Gelateria Gioia in Friolzheim, between Pforzheim and Stuttgart. “Someone finally understood this plate!” Metzler exclaims. The owner serves it personally. He says no one has ordered this ice cream from him in years. It’s a work of art for five euros, but they enthusiastically pay twice as much. Otherwise, the two are happy when they unexpectedly find pieces of pineapple or strawberries in the ice cream during their samples or when the vanilla ice cream has been replaced by lemon ice cream. Soon the plate is simply called “Mostro,” Italian for “monster.” Mastering it is challenging: “Nobody else does what we do. Maybe no one has ever done what we’re doing. We are pioneers, and in a questionable field.” They are brave. Because this ice cream is looking at you. It knows it tastes good.
Leonhard Hieronymi / Christian Metzler: Mostro. Pinocchio ice cream in Germany. Starfruit, 192 pages, hardcover, €25.
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