GelatoSpots

Research edition

Netherlands

Amsterdam

An Italian ijssalon on every corner and a dairy country behind it. Why has nobody ever ranked Amsterdam?

Amsterdam has two ice-cream traditions running side by side and rarely discussed together. One is the Italian ijssalon line that starts with emigrant families from Tuscany and the Veneto in the 1920s-1950s — Tofani (Benabbio, 1920/1942), Monte Pelmo (1957) and Jordino (1993) are three, four generations deep, still hand-scooping on the same streets. The other is Dutch dairy itself: this is one of the great milk countries in the world, and at least one Amsterdam maker, IJscuypje, names the actual farm and farmer behind its cream. A five-year-running local blind test (Mokum Magazine) treats the city's eighteen best salons with the seriousness of a restaurant review, and one shop, IJshoeve Sloten, has won it four times. No Amsterdam salon has placed in the Dutch national ice-cream championship in the years checked here — a real gap, not an oversight, and worth investigating further.

Last checked 2026-08-21

The selected spots

8 selected

  1. 01

    IJssalon Tofani

    ice cream · Riccardo and Daniele Politi (spelled 'Polito' in one source), brothers from Benabbio, Tuscany, owners since 2002/2003

    Tofani is the deepest, best-documented example of the Italian-emigrant ijssalon tradition found in Amsterdam: a continuous, still-Italian-run business on the same corner since 1942, with a genuinely dramatic wartime interruption and an unbroken chain of Benabbio-connected owners since 1920.

  2. 02
    A cone of pale pink gelato held at chest height, the person behind it in a striped shirtFrom Monte Pelmo

    Monte Pelmo

    ice cream · Angela (Cornelisse family descendant), with husband Peter and daughter Rozan running the Jordaan shop day to day

    A 1957 family business, born directly out of Amsterdam's postwar Italian guest-worker community, that still makes its ice cream fresh on-site daily and was independently ranked #3 of 18 tested Amsterdam salons in 2025.

  3. 03
    A high-heeled shoe modelled in ice cream and chocolate, the upper covered in orange sugar beadsFrom Jordino

    Jordino

    ice cream · Job Klebach (ice cream, still making it in-store past retirement age) and his son Jordi (bonbons); founded together as father and son in 1993

    A 1993 father-and-son business that still makes its ice cream by hand in the same shop, with a named maker (Job) still behind the counter three decades on, and an independent top-5 placing among Amsterdam's 18 most-tested salons.

  4. 04

    Van der Linde

    ice cream · Brothers Lars and Maikel van der Linde, grandsons of the founder

    An 88-year-old, still family-run, single-recipe whipped-cream ice cream shop that churns fresh every morning above its own counter — the clearest example in Amsterdam of Dutch (not Italian) ice cream culture, validated by a citywide reader vote in a respected heritage magazine.

  5. 05
    A black and white archive photograph of a man reading Gazzetta Sera beside a small child, against a wall painted L'ITALIAFrom Miuz

    Miuz

    gelato · Carlo Petroni, founder and owner, born and raised in Turin, resident in the Netherlands since 2014

    A 2022 gelateria built explicitly around named, traceable ingredients and a founder with direct professional roots in Turin's gelato culture, independently profiled by Dutch hospitality trade press and listed as a Slow Food Nederland professional.

  6. 06

    Massimo Gelato

    gelato · Massimo Bertonasco, founder, learned recipes from his grandmother's latteria (dairy shop) on the Ligurian Riviera dei Fiori and trained under an Italian gelato master

    A named founder with a directly traceable family recipe from a specific region of Italy, grown from one De Pijp shop in 2017 to five Amsterdam locations, independently tested and ranked by local press.

  7. 07

    Pisa IJs

    ice cream · Founded by Enrico Morelli, from Tuscany; currently run by his great-grandson Leonardo Frangini

    A 90-year-old, still-family-run ice cream kiosk with a real and specifically sourced threat to its future from municipal permit policy — exactly the kind of longevity-under-pressure story this collection should be recording while it is still true.

  8. 08

    IJshoeve Sloten

    ice cream

    The single most independently validated ice cream salon found in Amsterdam — winner of a rigorous, blind, panel-based local test four times across five years running, an unusually strong and repeatable form of local recognition for this kind of business.

Research notes

City boundary

The municipality of Amsterdam. Amstelveen and Haarlem are separate municipalities.