by Jenny White
Gus Rancatori is a Renaissance man who owns an ice cream parlor. Cambridge-based Toscanini’s is a hangout where you’re as likely to run into a Nobel Laureate in chemistry and a molecular foodie as a furniture maker or novelist. One day I met a dapper man with gray hair who had been a physicist at MIT and gave it all up to start a business making high-end marshmallows. Tosci’s staff is memorably pierced and talented. One of the managers, Adam Tessier, is a published poet and essayist who last year filmed a customer a day reading a Shakespeare sonnet. Some scoopers are music majors, hard-core rockers who play for bands with names like Toxic Narcotic. You might receive your khulfee cone from the hands of the next big pop star. Gus Rancatori circulates through the wood-paneled room beneath displays of art, the host at a rotating feast of words, ideas and, above all, ice cream. Gus is discreet, but has some favorite customer stories.
A very famous MIT type used to attempt to pay with his own hand-drawn funny money and then he would launch into a lecture about the symbolic value of money, which I tried to squelch by claiming to remember that class from Freshman Economics. If you asked to help him, he would say, “I'm beyond help.” When another MIT student found out that I didn't have a computer he offered to give me one, so strong were his evangelic instincts and also, like many of the customers, he was exceptionally generous.
With one hand Gus makes what The New York Times has called “the best ice cream in the world”; the other takes the cultural pulse of the city.