Gelato star is a nonstop swirl of creativity
Curbside gelato.
It’s one way to get through a pandemic.
And something that Kaya Ogruce has definitely keyed into. A Turkish dreamboat who is also Toronto’s reigning chemical-engineer-turnedprofessional-chef-turned-fulltime-scoop-artist, he has been making buzz with his far-out gelato — on the radar for a while now with both socialites in the know and downtown hipsterati — but even he’s been startled by demand of late.
“Rather than scaling back during this time, I decided to scale up,” he said when I caught up the other day, following a weekend that had him doing 80 deliveries, and during a time that has seen a near doubling of his company Death in Venice’s wholesale business.
People eating their feelings? Perhaps. A way, moreover, to leverage a more accessible indulgence in a time of stuck-at-home-ness? You betcha.
Ogruce, who achieved some notoriety when he won “Chopped Canada” in 2015 — using his winnings to purchase his first Carpigiani gelato-maker — has also cleverly leveraged social media.
His Instagram feed churns out pics of the artisanal swirl sourced from local dairy and fruit — cue, for instance, the photo of a peach-champagne-and-mint number that he dubbed “Call Me By Your Name.” As he explained to me, “I decided to create more content during this time, and every week create new flavours to start excitement.”
Yeah, something to look at this during these dark times: canvasses of gelato that look like a cross between Jackson Pollock drips and the wowza of a Holi celebration in India. (All available for free delivery, at a minimum five pints!)
I reached Ogruce just after Mother’s Day, when he had been pushing a coconut-lemon-cream-pie dazzler from his west-end gelateria.
On the to-do-list that week for the mad scientist — albeit one who rides a motorcycle — was a vegan nutella gelato (“once you take the milk out, it is hard to get that creaminess ... but I came up with a new way of processing the hazelnut”). Also taking up brain cells: a baba ghanouj version that he has been deliberating on for ages — not too radical for a guy who came up with a pad-Thai gelato last year! Known for many such aha dairy moments — a hay gelato, for instance, that combines honey with hay from Perth County which he roasts and then soaks in milk — he also, the other week, touted a superb-looking pistachio-baklava flavour, made from the famous “green gold” of Sicily.
Those pistachios — formed from the volcanic soil of Mount Etna — are super hard to land, but he managed to source two cases recently. He is hoarding as much as he can!
A dash of nostalgia comes scooped with that particular flavour because it summons the whole origin story of his journey into gelato (the denser, milkier Italian cousin of ice cream): he was on a motorcycle trip in Sicily when he stopped into a shop in a tiny town, selling just two flavours. One of which, naturally, was pistachio. He remembers leaning back on his bike, having that scoop, and thinking: maybe I could do this.
Worth dying for? When veering to a discussion about the name of his business, he confirmed that it had nothing to do with Venezia, per se, but the Thomas Mann novella by the same name that he read during his second year in university. “So, so poetic,” he trailed off.
“A passion that ruins you,” I added, giving my literary two cents.
The classic — which swirls around the themes of innocence and obsession — was made into a 1971 film by Luchino Visconti, which easily ranks as one of the more beautiful movies ever made. Being also smitten with the movie — which features a famous adagietto from Mahler, with whom the gelato generator is also obsessed — Ogruce decided years ago that, if he ever opened a company, he would call it “Death in Venice.”
Given his engineering background, though, “I thought it would be Death in Venice Construction, or, like, Death in Venice Plumbing.”
Thankfully, both of those propositions were avoided in favour of gelato. Ogruce tells me he actually collects old editions of the novella, and currently keeps six of them in his space.
As for where he gets inspiration for all his many au courant flavours, he gave a little audible shrug through the phone, telling me, “It is like that old quote — inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us go to work.”
No, he doesn’t get gelato inspo in the shower. Yes, things evolve through trial and error, though he does concede that sometimes ideas occur to him while running. His exercise of choice, which he’s done for the last 15 years, is a chance to really be in his head.
Raspberry ginger tandoori, perchance? Or how about some white truffle and sage? Then there is Mexican chocolate mole, which he loves but has described as a pain in the butt (the process involves multiple infusions, and just one batch takes four days).
Wondering what his family — all of whom are still back in Turkey — made of his decision to pivot careers, he made a startling confession (although one perhaps not too surprising in the immigrant context): he did not tell his parents for a long time that he had left engineering for cooking.
Though they were quite supportive when he first came to Toronto as an international student, upon which he nabbed a good job in engineering and started “making lots of money right out of the gate,” he kept mum when he first shifted to culinary school. He did not want his mother to know he was washing dishes, essentially, and so essentially told a white lie: that his job required an immersion in the food sciences, and to get that he needed to get some cooking experience.
“I wanted to wait to tell her once I was on the right path,” he said. Then came a job here at Scaramouche. Later: various stages overseas at well-rated spots in Holland and San Francisco. When employed at Le Grenouillère, a marquee restaurant in France, his parents came to see him — and it was a turning point.
Even later, he broke the news that he was shifting his focus away from cooking to doing gelato, period. His family remains bemused.
Asked, finally, about the role that his engineering background still plays in what he does today — all that left brain/ right brain stuff — Ogruce told me: “My job is all math. And gelato is a bit of science. No matter what kind of engineer you are, it’s all problem solving at the end of the day.” And so is gelato.