When Vincenzo Tettamanti moved to the West Chester area, he brought a little piece of home with him — gelato!
From “Family Owned & Operated.”
It’s not much of a stretch to say that gelato is Vincenzo Tettamanti’s birthright. “Being from Italy, when I moved here, it’s been a challenge to find the foods I was used to at home,” he says. “And so, I cooked: pastas, pizzas, and of course, desserts.”
This passion for the food of homeland eventually blossomed into a business. “I knew I wanted to open something, but I also knew I wanted it to be a bit more manageable than a restaurant,” Vincenzo says. “Gelato is something I grew up with, and it’s something I could make more artisanally than your standard American dessert.” And so, Gemelli was born.
Although she designed and maintained the Gemelli brand, Vincenzo’s wife, Julianne — the American woman for whom he’d traversed the Atlantic — stuck to her marketing and design career when they first launched. As business grew, so too did the responsibilities, until the point that Gemelli also required her undivided attention. “We have a solid relationship,” she says of working with her husband. “I trust and love him; he trusts and loves me. We each know that the decisions we make will always be to see each other succeed.”
Vincenzo agrees. “We have different skills and different strengths,” he says, “and we can leverage each other to build a better business.”
The only difficulty of working together? “It has to be work-life balance,” Julianne says with a laugh. “When we go home, we still talk about gelato.”
