It is a monument of old Nice, a place where you go without thinking, whether you are a tourist or a local. Fenocchio, the ice cream parlor on Place Rossetti, was taken over by Joseph and Louise of the same name in 1966. They made it an innovative house, where the number of recipes rivals their originality. But if everyone knows this Fenocchio, like the more recent one (1998) from rue de la Poissonnerie, few people “go up” to La Gaude, a town located about ten kilometers from Nice, in the heights.
It is however there that Joseph and Louise settled for their retirement, and there again that Frédéric, their son, had installed his only son, Francis, to be pampered there while he made the family business prosper. It was in La Gaude, therefore, that the first Fenocchio laboratory opened in 1995 and, in 2007, another even bigger one, as well as a boutique. This is also where we choose to enjoy an ice cream on the terrace.
Because the atmosphere in this hinterland of Nice, where the oleanders poorly camouflage a gloomy life, has everything of the hard-working and bureaucratic California of the 1960s: beating sun and striking architecture. Fenocchio is installed in the former works council building of IBM, an American computer company whose offices are located on the other side of the road. Built by Marcel Breuer, a student of the Bauhaus, known for his Wassily Chair, these elegant concrete blocks exude brutalism and are reminiscent of the Parisian headquarters of Unesco, built by the same Breuer and his colleagues Zehrfuss and Nervi.
The secret of cocoa sorbet
The intention may not be premeditated, but the seats in the shape of melted ice cream in a crunched cone, which recall the analysis of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour in their essay The Teaching of Las Vegas, give the impression of following a guided tour of the tensions between utopia and reality in American architecture from the 1960s to the 1970s.
This being said, it seems very simple to choose between the 35 flavors of ice cream offered in the window. In a cone almost as big as the armchairs triumphs a beautiful scoop of strawberry ice cream, under which hides another of speculoos as well as the famous family secret: cocoa sorbet. The latter clicks on the tongue, a delicious balance of bitter and sweet, while the creamy speculoos has everything of a cozy bed where you can take a nap. Finally, the strawberry, spangled with grains with its texture close to granita, reminds us that an ice cream is just an ice cream. She swallows herself, crunches herself, laps herself, licks herself, pecks herself.
Moreover, at the tables, children each adopt their own technique. Some push the ice cream to the bottom of the cone, others taste it with a spoon to then devour the plain biscuit, some have made up the tip of their nose, others only the edge of their mouth or even their fingers. But everyone agrees on one thing: an ice cream is savored in silence, gazing into the distance, in a suspended time where architectural and aesthetic considerations have no place. To eat ice cream is to blend in and enjoy it.
The address 1176, route de Saint-Laurent, La Gaude (Alpes-Maritimes). Such. : 04-92-11-03-55. Open Tuesday to Saturday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
The highly recommended flavor Cocoa sorbet, designed thirty years ago by Frédéric Fenocchio.
The bill €2.50 per scoop.
Find here all the flavors of summer.