Popping by the D’Ambrosio Gelato Instagram page, the slogan, “Since 1957” jumped out at me. I was doing my basic fact-check on a tidbit of food news—the original Ballard location closed at the end of last year—on a place I thought I knew well. Well enough to know that it had not been around “Since 1957.” Just as surprising was that the Ballard shop seemed to be the least of the company’s concerns: Its website boasts of nearly 20 locations, mainly in Asia.

Knowing I hadn’t hallucinated my friend (and fellow food writer) Geraldine DeRuiter telling me back in 2010 about her family opening a gelato shop, I shot her a text. “Uhhhh my uncle was nine in 1957,” she responded, laughing. That would be Enzo D’Ambrosio, the gelato maker who opened the Ballard sweet shop in 2010 with his son Marco.

Marco and Enzo left the gelato business and the city in 2016, selling it to local chef Jordan Barrows and his wife, Rebecca. (Barrows opened a shave-ice truck near Bend, Oregon, last year.) In 2020, the D’Ambrosio Gelato's business license changed hands again, this time to Nomura Venture Capital.

Since then, the brand’s sweet purple logo (“Since 2010”) has been replaced by a sleek black-and-white script and that “Since 1957” that had caught my eye. It has locations in Virginia, Taiwan, and Japan. It has a website that hocks franchise opportunities and weaves a romantic tale of the company’s commitment to its Italian dairy roots with the occasional VC term, like “synergy.” In contrast, the menu page states that all its ingredients are from Italy except for milk and cream. (Under both the D’Ambrosios and Barrows, the gelateria sourced from Fresh Breeze Organic Dairy in Lynden.)

It’s hardly the only time a name lives on, long divorced from the person who bestowed it—the McDonald brothers left their famous name behind in 1961. Closer to home, Ezell Stephens lost a legal battle to his former partners in the fried chicken business, leaving him to open Heaven Sent while his ex-brother-in-law, Lewis Rudd, runs Ezell’s Famous Chicken.

Perhaps even more apt are two smaller scale businesses. D’Ambrosio, a clearly Italian name, ties the company to those romantic ideals of gelato’s homeland, whether real (as in Enzo and Marco’s lived experience) or imagined (as by the venture capital firm). Similarly, Rubinstein Bagels and Westman’s Bagel & Coffee, both serve overtly Ashkenazi Jewish–American food under the name of their Jewish cofounders, each of whom left not long after the business opened. (This week, Andrew Rubinstein opened his own venture, Hey Bagel, in University Village.)

In each of these cases, the specific heritage of the name gives a certain amount of legitimacy to the business, signifying that this is a place that knows bagels because the owner teethed on pumpernickel, or gelato because it’s as much Italian birthright as talking with your hands and judging people who drink cappuccinos after noon. That’s not how things work, obviously. And, as Ezell’s demonstrates, it’s unlikely anybody did anything wrong from a legal standpoint. It’s all just sort of weird and disingenuous, like when you learn that Häagen-Dazs is in fact a made-up pseudo-Danish name by a Jewish guy from the Bronx.

I reached out to Marco D’Ambrosio by email to see if he had heard about the adventure his name had been on since he left the gelato shop behind or had any thoughts on it, but haven’t heard back. His cousin Geraldine offered the following statement by text, which basically sums up the whole affair: “lol, WTF, no.”