On a hot sunny afternoon when your crisp cotton shirt begins to limp very few people can resist a scoop of an ice cream. And the Italians would probably go for gelato. Well, for the uninitiated, gelato is a lighter, more intensely flavourful Italian ice cream. And chances are you’ll probably get to taste one soon enough thanks to Natasha Aggarwal.

Barely a year into this business and Mama Mia, the Kolkata based gelataria, has started spreading its wings to other cities like Mumbai and Bangalore. Its entrepreneur-23 year old Natasha Aggarwal is a happy girl, because she takes the credit of having opened India’s first gelataria Mama Mia at New Alipore, Kolkata, on 1st May, 2005, it was eastern India’s first gelataria. Today, there are as many as three outlets of Mama Mia in Kolkata itself.

Her success in Kolkata encouraged her to launch two outlets in Mumbai and the latest addition in her count being an outlet in Bangalore.

Natasha reminisces about the time when she initially opened her first outlet in Kolkata, “I was the chef, the salesgirl, all rolled into one. My family members encouraged and supported me a lot.” Now she has trained a team of workers and chefs.

Natasha herself comes from an ice-cream background, her father Shanti Aggarwal being the proprietor of the popular Rollicks ice cream. After graduating with a BBA degree from UK’s Warwick University, she decided to start off on an independent enterprise. In fact, Natasha started off by taking a loan for her venture instead of depending on family resources.

When asked why gelatos? She says, “I always felt that there is a huge gap in the premium segment of ice cream. So, I mulled over the idea of doing something to fill the vacuum in this segment, When I went on a holiday to Italy, I had a taste of Italian gelatos. I found that they tasted different from our regular ice-creams. I just felt that this was something most people in India haven’t tasted.”

Gelato, a delicacy from Italy, is what ‘kulfi’ is to India. The production of gelato is an Italian art that originated in Tuscany in 1565 and has since become an integral part of Italian culture and cuisine. There are basically two types of gelatos — fruit gelato and cream gelato.

The fruit gelato is made with natural fruit pulp and hence the fat content is very nominal. The cream gelato on the other hand, includes innovative creations of non-fruit flavours. Gelatos have low fat content and are different in texture and taste from the industrial ice cream. This is because the volume of air which is used to fluff up frozen desserts is 30% in gelato as compared to 100% in ice cream, thereby making gelatos far more intense in flavour and rich in smoothness. Natasha says, “Gelatos have to be made fresh daily and so have to be made on a small scale. Making of gelatos is very labour intensive and a lot of handwork is involved.”

Natasha, who learnt trained the art of making gelatos under Chef Danielle Ghisalberti of Bergamo, Italy, has made sure that her gelatos are, “based on the original recipes from Chef Danielle Ghisalberti our gelatos are manufactured in the traditional homemade artisan style — in small batches, involving a greater level of craftsmanship and skill in comparison to regular industrial ice cream.” As a tribute to gelato’s land of origin Natasha has given her outlet an Italian sounding name — Mama Mia! With its premium products and snazzy interiors, one could, in fact, mistake it for an actual Italian joint. She laughs, “Many people actually enquired if I had taken the franchisee for an Italian company. People were taken aback when told that Mama Mia is a Kolkata-based company.”

Among the varieties of fruit gelatos offered are orange, honeydew melon, watermelon, Sicily lemon, green apple, wine grape, passion fruit, ginger lemon, blueberry, strawberry and mango, to mention a few. Natasha points out that lactose intolerant people just freak out on the fruit gelatos. Also, keeping diabetic clients in mind, Natasha has kept two varieties of sugar-free gelatos — vanilla and chocolate.

Some of the popular cream gelatos available are tiramisu, natural pistachio, natural vanilla, pinacolada, muddy fudge, cookie crumble, figs and cream, forest berries and cream, chocolate cinnamon, Nutella and Kit Kat to name a few. The place is also into gelato cakes, comprising of four primary flavours — cookie crumbles, Caffe Italiano, Chocossism and mixed berries.