What is Gelato Cimmino?
On a block of Main Street where the windows hold bronze horses and oil paintings, one storefront holds tins of gelato. Gelato Cimmino is the royal-blue-and-white shop between the galleries, and it makes the most Italian scoop in Old Town for a simple reason: much of it starts in Italy.
The owner, Mario Cimmino, grew up in Torre del Greco, a town on the Bay of Naples. He moved to Arizona in 2010, went out for gelato every night, and found none he liked. In mid-October 2018 he opened his own shop at 7140 E Main St, and he solved the authenticity problem by going home for it. Cimmino makes his gelato bases in Naples with his close friend Vincenzo Mennella, who runs one of the city’s better gelaterias, using ingredients from Campania: lemons from the Amalfi coast, hazelnuts from Giffoni Valle Piana, walnuts from Sorrento, apricots from trees below Vesuvius. The bases are frozen and shipped to Arizona, where the shop churns them with Danzeisen Dairy milk and tins fresh batches as needed.
The result is southern-Italian gelato: very smooth and creamy, “almost like a dessert,” in Cimmino’s words. The menu is deliberately short and follows the harvest, about a dozen gelati and a few sorbetti rather than fifty flavors with jokey names. Two scoops define the shop. Cimmino Rock is chocolate, hazelnut and cookie bits. Almond and orange, made with Sicilian oranges, was called by Phoenix New Times one of the best frozen scoops of any kind in town.
Seven years on, Phoenix New Times still put it on its 2025 list of the Valley’s 12 best ice cream shops. It has a second shop in downtown Gilbert now, but Main Street is the original.
How to order
Taste before you commit. The staff will offer samples, and the right first spoon is the almond and orange. Then compare the chocolates, dark against milk, or the nut flavors, hazelnut, pistachio and hazelnut-Nutella, which is where Campanian sourcing shows most clearly.
Follow the season. Fruit flavors appear when the fruit is in season and disappear when it isn’t. Lemon, raspberry and strawberry are regulars; cantaloupe and blueberry come and go. A cup with one creamy flavor and one sorbetto is the balanced order.
Use the coffee bar. Gelato Cimmino serves espresso drinks too, and an affogato, gelato drowned in a shot of espresso, is the right order on a cool winter evening.
Time it to the street. The shop opens at 10 a.m. daily and stays open until 9 p.m. early in the week and 10 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, which makes it the natural last stop of an ArtWalk Thursday. In summer, when Old Town empties in the heat, it is one of the few reasons to be on Main Street in the afternoon. Nearby, Malee’s Thai Bistro is across the street for dinner first, and Waddell Gallery and the other Native and Western galleries line the block.
Compare notes. Old Town has a small gelato rivalry. PussyCat Gelato on Fifth Avenue pours its own all-natural style a few blocks north; Chin Up Donuts and Růže Cake House cover the rest of Main Street’s sweet tooth.
Naples by freight, on a Western art street
Gelato Cimmino opened into a crowded field. When it arrived in 2018, Phoenix New Times noted the odds: a gelato shop opening right after summer, in a district already full of gelato and ice cream, run by an Italian making gelato for the first time. What set it apart was a supply chain. Plenty of shops import an ingredient or two; Cimmino imported the method, making his bases in Naples with a working gelato-maker, so that the shop’s job in Scottsdale is the last step, churning and serving.
That ambition fit the Valley’s frozen-dessert culture. Metro Phoenix’s brutal summers have produced an unusually deep scene of ice cream, shave ice, paletas and raspados, and Old Town’s share of it clusters where the walking is: Fifth Avenue, the Waterfront and the gallery blocks of the Main Street arts district. A small shop selling seasonal Neapolitan flavors in the middle of the galleries became one of the street’s most reliable daytime businesses, a place where art buyers and families waiting for them meet.
The pandemic years did not stop it. In January 2021, after two years in Old Town, Gelato Cimmino announced a second shop in downtown Gilbert, in a former stereo shop on Gilbert Road, and by 2025 the Phoenix New Times guide to the Valley’s best ice cream described the brand as an all-Italian experience in both towns, with owners from Torre del Greco importing ingredients and techniques.
The honest assessment: Gelato Cimmino is a small counter with a short list, and anyone looking for novelty flavors will find it plain. That is the point. In a neighborhood that often sells Italy as a theme, this is one of the few places where the product genuinely came from there, and the almond and orange is as good an argument for that as anything on Main Street.