At Bebe Zito, Each Ice Cream Tells a Story

Bebe Zito and the next generation of Twin Cities ice cream spots have something new to say about frozen sweetness.

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If you could take a personal moment of your life, unique to you, cherished by you, and turn it into ice cream, what would you create? Your mom’s special yellow birthday cake, the pack of Dunkaroos and frosting you brought to eat out on the dock, and the blue of the lake? Maybe it would be the bananas your mom brought from the store and the glass of orange juice you drank as you helped her unpack the groceries while she told you news from back home in Brazil?

If you’d asked me what was personal about ice cream flavors before I went to Bebe Zito, I’d have guessed it was your favorite flavor: My son always tries the vanilla. My grandma physically started with joy if the freezer case held black walnut. 

But then I started going to Bebe Zito, the ice cream parlor that Ben Spangler, founding ice cream chef at Milkjam and longtime local pastry star, and his wife, Gabriella Grant, a designer and marketer, opened around the corner from the Red Dragon during the pandemic. Here, every flavor is personal, a story, a narrative. 

“Romeu e Julieta” is a tale of Grant’s childhood, in which her Brazilian mother cooked dessert with groceries she could get in Eagan—so the ice cream is a little guava paste, a little cream cheese, a bit of caramelized Ritz cracker crumble, all folded together into something alternatingly rich and tart. “Slam Dunkie” is Spangler’s birthday memories: cookies made of yellow cake batter blended in lake-colored ice cream, with real Dunkaroos added for good measure. “Sugarloaf Mountain Sorbet” is another tale from Grant’s family—roasted bananas in molasses and orange juice combining to make something that tastes a bit like a brandy cocktail, a bit like tropical fruit in the rain, a bit like thunderstorms you just hear in the distance. “Breakfast Club” is Spangler’s childhood eating Lucky Charms and Fruity Pebbles in front of cartoons, fused with his present-day reality as an accomplished pastry chef who knows his way around the Sicilian flower-and-herb essence Fiori di Sicilia and uses it to make American cereals even more fragrant. 

Stories, served in a cup or cone. This has been the way of food in elite dining for a while now. For instance, when San Francisco chef Dominique Crenn creates a dish called Autobiographie of an Oyster, it’s understood to be a dish not merely about the oyster but also about her memories of it—her story of it, her narrative, or as she calls it, her “poetic culinaria.” 

This is actually a more accurate way of talking about food than how we have before, to my mind. There’s no such thing as a purely unmediated experience of an oyster. You could drive to the Pacific coast and eat at the shack near where the oysters are harvested, or you could have your oysters at your regular table at your favorite old steak house, and these are very much stories, too, even if we don’t mention them.

Story, biography, narrative, dialogue—you find these even in the plain vanilla ice cream at Bebe Zito. Because it’s not plain vanilla. It’s Tahitian vanilla with added MSG, as a means of both boosting flavor and taking a side in the MSG wars that have been raging on the internet. (In sum: MSG is one form of glutamate, a naturally occurring amino acid that your body spontaneously creates. It is naturally present in a great many foods, including tomatoes and cheese. However, starting in the 1960s, many Americans claimed that the Chinese technique of adding it directly to foods gave them headaches. In 1999, legendary food writer Jeffrey Steingarten asked, in a culture-turning essay, “Why doesn’t everyone in China have a headache?” And ever since, this ongoing chatter around MSG use has been seen instead as veiled anti-Asian racism.) 

At Bebe Zito, insist Spangler and Grant, “Vanilla MSG” is a way for the shop to tell a story about justice. “All that xenophobic ideology around MSG being bad for you: I want to force people to think about that,” explains Grant. “And I also don’t want a ‘normal’ flavor on the menu.” It’s an interesting tale to tell on Bebe Zito’s particular stretch of 22nd Street, the ribbon connecting the Wedge Co-op and Tao Natural Foods, two of Baby Boomer health world’s most significant still-standing triumphs. Yet what’s a story without conflict? 

The larger story behind Bebe Zito is that Ben Spangler grew up in Maple Grove, son of a chef dad who worked around town, including at the Hotel Sofitel, and a mom who was a baker and sometimes worked as a school lunch lady. At 17, Spangler got his first kitchen job, in a pizza place, and soon scrambled up to a key role at the sister Italian restaurants Bacio and Zelo, where there were ice cream machines. “When everyone was at the bar drinking after work, I’d be like, I think I’ll go make ice cream,” he recalls. Many, many experiments followed. Someone noticed, and his name ended up on a long list of stunt-food TV contestants. He started getting phone calls like: Can you send a video of something cool made out of ice cream, tomorrow? That’s how he ended up with some trips to the coasts and appearances on food television. (“I still get calls—Hi, it’s The Great American Baking Show. I know it’s the middle of summer, but can you make a Yule log, tomorrow?”) 

“When everyone was at the bar drinking after work, I’d be like, I think I’ll go make ice cream.”

Ben Spangler

When Spangler heard World Street Kitchen chef Sameh Wadi was looking to hire an opening ice cream chef for Milkjam, he introduced himself and went on to develop some of the Cities’ most frantically pursued cult ice creams, like the cocoa-bitter “Black.” “I remember the Star Tribune came out with some list of the five best ice creams one year. Two were mine, one from Rustica and one from Milkjam, and my name was nowhere on it,” Spangler remembers of those striving years. Then, one day, fate and fortune changed everything, through Tinder. Swipe right; enter Gabriella Grant.

Grant grew up in Eagan—the child of a mom from Brazil who made wedding cakes at home and a computer-programmer dad born in Minnesota who spent a formative decade in Brazil—needless to say, she lived and breathed Brazil. Once Grant grew up, she went to art school in Milwaukee, returning home with strong skills in design, branding, and creating immersive experiences. Then she met Spangler.

“When we first started dating, most of our dates involved going out for ice cream,” explains Spangler. “And talking to Gabriella, in my heart I realized I love making ice cream, but I don’t want to do it for other people; I want to do it for me.” 

Says Grant, “What was important for us was to create a space where we can tell our story, in all the ways we can.” And that’s the story behind these sweet and scoopable stories. 

Grant is responsible for the branding and design. The radical/adorable tattooed Kewpie doll is her vision of the abundantly tattooed Spangler. Spangler is responsible for the exacting ice cream construction, going through 20 versions of yellow-cake cookies to get the right texture to blend into the ice cream, sifting through all the world’s pistachios to find the ones that sing. (Those pistachios are raised under armed guard in Sicily, because the mafia otherwise steals the valuable harvest. But they’re worth it. They make an ice cream that’s bright and nutty and better than any other pistachio ice cream I’ve had.) 

Spangler also perfected the burgers Bebe Zito sells every weekend. Made to order in a trailer parked out back of the ice cream spot, they’re terrific. Crusty patties, ooey-gooey cheese, a sweet Hawaiian-style bun—and at $5.95 a single, a third of the price of most of the cult burgers in town. It’s well deserving of the crowds out front and the expansion to a burger spot in the food hall at Malcolm Yards. That burger, too, tells a story: Spangler’s allegiances are firmly on the side of people who only have 10 bucks for dinner and cooks who want to get through their shift having achieved greatness without hassle. “When you make one thing, you’d be surprised how much better you can make it,” he says. “If more people made one thing, we’d have better food.” 

This thought seems to have taken hold in several minds this year. The Nelson’s Ice Cream crew in Stillwater took over the former Izzy’s space on Marshall in St. Paul for one thing: Ice cream sandwiches made with house-made cookies. 

A to Z Creamery has become an internet sensation, with founder and owner Zach Vraa turning his mom’s birthday gift of an ice cream maker into an Instagram-based business. These days, he sells 300 to 400 pints of a one-time flavor each week to customers off his nearly 10,000-person mailing list. Follow the Instagram account, and you, too, can sign up for a chance to try pints of potato-chip-fudge ice cream or cheese-and-caramel-popcorn ice cream. 

“I have obsessed fans. I think it’s because I make everything from scratch, and people get excited when they see the flavors and know they only get one chance,” says Vraa. Winners of the weekly lottery pick up their pints in St. Louis Park, though he is looking for a brick-and-mortar location for a possible fall opening. 

It’s hard not to wonder about all the kids who were locked at home last year in the pandemic now getting out there this summer and trying this new world of original ice creams. What stories will this summer’s ice cream eaters turn into their own biographies? And how will these stories and ice creams percolate through art and work into the ice creams of future summers? This is what’s known in the trade as a story without an ending. And sometimes those are the sweetest and the best.

Bebe Zito, 704 W. 22nd St., Mpls., bebezitomn.com; A to Z Creamery, atozcreamery.com; Nellie’s Ice Cream, 2034 Marshall Ave., St. Paul, 651-645-7839, nelliesicecream.com