Brooklyn just got a little more Florentine, and you’d never know it unless you knew exactly where to find a hole in the wall with a brass cowbell dangling outside.
When news spread about the revival of Florence’s historic wine windows known as “buchette del vino,” two designers decided it was time to carve out a hole in the wall for Brooklyn gelato. (Buchette means “holes” in Italian.)
In a matter of days, Janet Braunstein and Joshua Schwartz sealed up the garage door of their Brooklyn studio, stuccoed the wall, painted it a blush pink, and built a small window with a wooden shutter just low enough for a child to peek through. As they worked, pedestrians from the park nearby stopped to comment. Many already recognized the concept of a “wine window” from CNN and other outlets.
The friends named the new pop-up gelateria, “Midriff Hole,” after the ones in Florence and the warm summer months when you want to remove your clothes and expose that place on the body where gelato eventually ends up.
Since then, they sell out every weekend in less than an hour.
Aside from managing professional design careers and a long friendship that began at the Maryland Institute College of Art, both Janet and Joshua have been influenced by the gelato palates of their Italian romantic partners... just a bit.
“Pistachio was the first thing we had to have,” said Joshua describing the flavor experiments early on. “We do it with homemade pistachio paste.”
With a few rounds of experimenting, Janet said they found a combination that keeps the bright and sweet flavor of fresh pistachios– nothing like you find in stores.
Looking to the future, Janet and Joshua are looking for a partner to take this small-batch gelato to the next level. “Maybe the hole will travel,” said Janet.
(As reported by CNN, there are 180 wine windows in Florence and many were “widely used” during the Italian Plague of 1629-1631. By our count, this is the first-ever in Brooklyn.)