What a weird, awesome little fruit!

If you spend long enough working in restaurants or cafes, there's bound to be an ingredient that you handle all the time that you didn't know much about. For me, avocados fall square into that description. For one thing, I'm a little embarrassed at how recently it was that I discovered that it's "avocado," not "advocado."  Weird linguistic quirk more than anything, I guess.

And there are so many gadgets associated with avocados! I mean, look at this thing:

I truly don't understand what you'd do with two thirds of it. The little vanes on the right, sure. I can see how you're maybe too lazy to just use a regular knife--even a butter knife would do. But then why do you need a weird, dull little blade on the other end? And what's with the donut hole?

Seriously, you can disassemble an avocado using...pretty much anything. I mean, myself I bust through them quickest with my chef's knife, but I pretty much always see people cringe when I thunk the blade into the pit. "You're sending an enormous knife careening toward the palm of your hand!!" It's ok. I got this. I'm a professional. Working in a Mexican restaurant, you learn pretty quickly how to plow through a case of avocados to make guacamole. (In the interest of reader safety, you can always put a kitchen towel between the avocado you're attempting to de-pit and the hand holding the fruit.)

And remember that an avocado (well, the tree is technically what we're referring to when you say "avocado," but we all know where we're at) really is a fruit! It's got a seed on the inside and it forms from the flower. Really guacamole is probably the result of a tomato and an avocado bonding at an otherwise super-lame party about constantly being mis-identified as vegetables.

So yeah, for a place that leans pretty far to the Italian side of the spectrum, we sure do love avocados. Never mind a pumpernickel bagel with tomato and avocado (breakfast of champions, that) or a grilled cheese panini on focaccia with provolone and avocado...you HAVE had our avocado sorbetto, right? It's maybe one of the more infrequent flavors we feature, but it's another along the lines of tahini gelato or cactus pear sorbetto--something you're not going to find at places that limit themselves to just 31 flavors.

So! Avocados: awesome and creamy and delicious and good for you. We're happy to be your go-to avocado advocates.