What is Allora Gelato?
Allora Gelato is a 575-square-foot gelateria at 6990 E Shea Boulevard, Suite 106, in the retail strip off the southeast corner of Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard, the busiest intersection in the Shea Corridor. It opened in November 2024, according to Phoenix New Times’ guide to the Valley’s best ice cream; a WhatNow report says early 2024, and the shop’s own site gives no date. New Times’ opening review, published in February 2025, said the shop had opened two months earlier, which supports the later date.
The owners are Lalo Fuentes, who is from Peru and styles himself founder and gelatiere, and Ciara Jarosch, his fiancée. Fuentes had been working as a private chef and trainer for an Arizona family on a three-year contract. When it ended, he and Jarosch, then a full-time hairstylist, sold everything they owned and spent 18 months abroad eating and studying gelato, from Italy to Morocco, Turkey, Southeast Asia and Bali. The idea was older than that: in 2014, sailing in Italy, Fuentes followed a smell through the streets of Capri to a tiny shop with a line of 65 people and came away with a warm handmade cone and the conviction that he had to bring it home. The name is his gloss on the Italian word: back when, gelato the way it was made 150 years ago.
The shop is modern anyway. You order at an iPad by the door, choosing cup, gluten-free cone or cold brew float and one or two scoops, and pay (it is cashless), then move to the counter to sample and pick. The default is the Perfect Pair, two scoops in a gluten-free waffle cone baked on site; Jarosch perfected the cone recipe and the ricotta whip. The gelato is churned in small batches on a Cattabriga machine with natural ingredients and no artificial color, finished with an Italian wafer, and New Times described a light, whipped texture that is visible while the staff shape the scoops.
Who it is for: the neighborhood after dinner, families from the subdivisions south of Shea, and anyone who has stood in a line in Italy and missed it. Our verdict: the best gelato on the north side of the city, and the only shop in Scottsdale where the cone is as good a reason to go as what is in it.
How to use Allora Gelato well
Order the Perfect Pair in a cone. Two scoops, gluten-free waffle cone, Italian wafer on top. The cone is baked in the shop every day and you can smell it from the sidewalk, which is the Capri experience Fuentes set out to copy. A cup is available, and a cold brew float, the shop’s take on an affogato, is the third format. Prices are not published on the website or in the press we found; expect a few dollars more than a chain scoop and well under $15 for two people.
Pick one serious flavor and one easy one. The serious side is where the shop earns its reputation: Ricotta and Croatian Fig, with figs imported from Croatia; Olive Oil and Rosemary, made with Italian oil; Mexican Coffee with organic Ceylon cinnamon; Bourbon Salted Caramel with crystals of Celtic sea salt; Hazelnut and Orange Zest; Mesquite Honey Lavender (sometimes chamomile) built on local mesquite honey from the desert. The easy side is Strawberry Dolce on a tres leches-style milk base, Mint Cookies and Cream and Chocolate Brownie. Sorbets, among them Lemon Lavender, tinted pink by real lavender, and a Balinese coconut refined after a tasting trip to Bali, are vegan, as is the dark chocolate. The pistachio granita is a Sicilian idea done with organic coconut water, roasted pistachios and vanilla-bean ricotta whip. A new flavor arrives every month; ask.
Timing. The shop opens at 1 p.m. every day and closes at 9 Sunday through Thursday and 10 Friday and Saturday. That makes it a dessert stop rather than a lunch one, and the line builds after 7 on warm nights; weekday afternoons are empty. In summer the parking lot is an oven, so eat inside. The staff work from a four-page hospitality document Fuentes wrote in the style of a resort, which explains why a gelato counter talks to you like a concierge.
Getting there. The suite faces the Shea side of the strip, with the lot in front; the former Sushi on Shea space is a few doors down. From Old Town it is a straight run north on Scottsdale Road. If you are comparing, the city’s other serious scoops are Gelato Cimmino on Main Street in Old Town, Cool Gelato Italiano at the Civic Center and Sweet Republic two miles east on Shea, which makes ice cream rather than gelato; our what to eat in Scottsdale guide puts them in order.
The corner that lost a gelato shop and got a better one
Scottsdale Road and Shea has had gelato before. The Gelato Spot, a family-owned Valley chain, ran a store at the intersection for seven years before shutting it in August 2013, telling New Times it wanted the location to be more like its Old Town store, with wood-fired pizza and a bigger menu, and could not make that work here. For the eleven years that followed the corner’s frozen dessert was whatever the supermarkets stocked. Allora is a different bet: smaller, single-minded, and built on the premise that a 575-square-foot room can be a destination if the product is good enough and the experience is theatrical enough.
Fuentes’ version of the theater is sensory. He told New Times his whole idea was that going for ice cream used to be an experience when you were a kid and somehow stopped being one, and that he wanted to give that back to adults: the smell of the cones, the music, the machine rolling gelato in view, the sampling spoons, a staff coached from a four-page document on how a resort treats a guest. The interior and the playlist borrow from Bratislava, Bali and Tulum, stops on the couple’s 18-month study trip; the flavors borrow from Morocco and Turkey (spice, honey, mint), Southeast Asia (coconut water, jackfruit, sweet potato) and Taormina (the granita). Jarosch said that every business idea Fuentes ever floated ended with Allora, so she told him to scratch plans B and C. They did much of the build-out themselves: smoothing walls, painting, tearing out floors.
The press response was fast for a dessert shop. New Times ran a full opening feature in February 2025, headlined on the handmade cones, and by the summer had Allora on its list of the ten best ice cream shops in the Valley, calling the gelato beautifully made and the line worth standing in. A VoyagePhoenix interview followed in July. In November 2025 WhatNow reported a second location signed for 325 N Ash Street in downtown Gilbert’s Collab Building, with no opening date; as of our last look the company’s website still listed only Scottsdale. What the record does not say: the shop’s prices, a phone number that two directories can agree on, and the exact opening day.
Honest assessment: Allora is a very good gelateria that is slightly over-narrated. The gelato is clean, light and honestly flavored, the cone is the best in the city, and the monthly flavor keeps regulars coming back; the Capri origin story and the resort-style hospitality script are a lot of framing for two scoops, and the 1 p.m. opening and cashless register will annoy some people. None of that matters on a July night at 8:30 with a warm cone in your hand. It is the best thing to happen to dessert in the Shea Corridor in the 2020s.