Angelo Brocato

GO FOR: Italian ice cream, Sicilian cannoli, tasty pastries, and delicious coffee.

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This is a celebrated NOLA PLACE. Long standing, traditional, and cherished.

Angelo Brocato® Original Italian Ice Cream Parlor has been run by the Brocato family in New Orleans for more than a hundred years, but its history is steeped in Sicilian traditions that trace roots to Palermo at the end of the 19th century.

Come here for cannoli, spumoni, torroncino, and granita a limone.

This small shop is jovial in every sense of the word. People come from all over the city for tasty treats, families order huge boxes of goods far in advance for holiday parties, and no trip to Venezia Restaurant is complete without stopping in at Brocato’s afterwards for dessert.

Founded in the French Quarter, where it operated for more than 80 years, Brocato’s sits proudly today in the heart of Mid City.

Angelo Brocato’s was filled with more five feet of water after Hurricane Katrina, and it remained closed for more than a year. Family ambition and optimism, helped them reopen, along with clamoring pleas from thousands of customers across metro New Orleans. Buoyed by local support — Brocato’s reopened on September 23, 2006.

I remember it well, that date was on our minds all week, and we didn’t care how long the line was going to be to get in (we brought waiting beers). And wait, people did: in a line that reached down the block.

We had entertainment by Benny Grunch and the Bunch, and the Brocato family had the blessing of some nuns who turned up to renew their regular ice cream and coffee fix. Surrounded by the still-devastated neighborhood, the reopening was a source of joy and pride, and Brocato’s remains that sort of joyful, prideful place to this day. – scott mccrossen