A slice of traditional spumoni from Lost Letter
Sundays at Lost Letter — the new Northern Italian-inspired restaurant within Longoven in Scott’s Addition that opened earlier this year — are extra sweet, thanks to co-owner Megan Fitzroy Phelan’s spumoni, a three-layer ice cream cake the pastry chef first perfected in New York City.
“The inspiration for the original ice cream cake,” she explains, “was the nostalgia of a Carvel cake, but better. When you think about Carvel cakes, you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s so good,’ and then you eat one, and it’s not that good. The idea was to make the best version of the Carvel cake you have in your mind.” Phelan was originally hired as the ice cream cake chef on the opening team of Parm, an NYC mainstay since 2011 from Michelin-starred chefs Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi.
Spumone (plural spumoni) is an Italian tri-layer ice cream cake that was likely the precursor to three-flavored Neapolitan ice cream. The traditional version of the cool cake combines three flavors with a fruit-and-nut layer between each. In Phelan’s, chocolate, pistachio and strawberry gelatos are sandwiched with layers of crumbled dark chocolate sable cookies, which share the sandy crumb of a shortbread. The cake is finished with a frosting of nondairy whipped topping, a component that makes the classically trained pastry chef laugh: It’s not heavy cream, and that’s the point. The frozen topping acts just like the “frosting” layer of a Carvel cake, staying cool but never freezing to the point where it becomes too hard for a spoon to glide through.
Similarly, Phelan adds, the so-called “ice cream cake” is actually a gelato cake. Not only is gelato prized for being more flavor-forward than American-style ice cream — which freezes to a dense, hard mass — it slices smoothly when frozen. Keeping the whimsical creations at 0 degrees Fahrenheit is imperative, which is one reason guests will only spot spumoni on the menu on Sundays. The rest of the week, the freezer at Lost Letter is simply too full to keep the cakes at their ideal temperature.
Lost Letter co-owner Megan Fitzroy Phelan
Although the quintessential chocolate-pistachio-strawberry combination is what diners will typically find on Sundays, there are deviations, such as a recent version that featured chocolate, Nutella, banana and toasted hazelnuts. Spumoni, Phelan says, invites that kind of (Milk Bar chef and cookbook author) Christina Tosi-esque playfulness: “stoner flavors,” she jokes. At Parm, Phelan toyed with combos including The Elvis, which married chocolate, banana, peanut butter and bacon, and a riff on the Snickers bar, made with chocolate, peanuts and caramel and topped with bits of the chopped candy.
Phelan says it was her husband, Lost Letter co-owner Patrick Phelan, who decided to showcase the dessert exclusively on Sundays, their de facto “industry night,” when familiar faces from the food and beverage community tend to pop by. Lost Letter chef Andrew Manning usually runs his own savory specials on Sundays, but spumoni, Phelan says, is the pastry side’s way of sharing something sweet and exceptional.
