In the four years since it opened at the corner of Broadway and Abeel in the Rondout, Rosie General has become one of those places people build small routines around: coffee after school drop-off, sandwiches midday, a loaf of bread carried home like an after-work prize. Now, just across the street, the family behind Rosie has opened Sobrinos Gelato, a sunny little scoop shop in Kingston that feels less like a departure than a sweet extension of the world they have been building at Rosie.
For co-owner Anthony Sasso, the idea started as much with the building as it did with gelato. When the space across from Rosie became available, the team went over to take a look and found another old Kingston room with a story already inside it. “We used the space as much as the concept we had in mind to make this place what it is,” Sasso says.
That has been part of Rosie’s identity from the beginning. The bakery and general store feel rooted in the Rondout’s neighborhood history, with bread, coffee, and sandwiches filling the void that existed at the time. Sobrinos began with a similar question: What is missing nearby?
For a while, Sasso says, they had imagined pizza, but the Abeel Street space had other ideas. It was small, split-level, and better suited to something lighter, quicker, and a little more joyful. Ice cream made perfect sense.
“Ice cream shops crush in this part of New York,” says Sasso, who grew up in Glasco. “They’re all a part of our lives. The Jolly Cow is in my DNA.”
For the Kids
The name, Sobrinos, means nephews, a nod to the boys in Sasso’s family and to the kid energy that shaped the shop from the start. “We’re in the business of making kids happy,” he says. “All my sisters have kids. That’s where the name comes from.” The shop is family-built in the same way Rosie General is, with Sasso’s sisters Nicole, Andrea, and Ashley all involved in different ways.
Inside, Sobrinos feels like Rosie’s sweeter, sillier sibling. The room has the warmth of an old neighborhood shop, with exposed brick, penny-tile floors, and green booth seating with marble-topped tables. Shelves hold housemade wet walnuts, dulce de leche, preserved lemons, and fruit jam, while kids can spend their quarters on jars of classic loose candies and read any number of children’s books provided in their tiny library. It is polished, but doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Fresh, Not Flashy
The shop has been quietly open for a few weeks, with the team focused less on making noise on social media and more on getting the product, space, and rhythm right, with the menu keeping one foot in classic ice cream parlor territory and the other in Hudson Valley seasonality, though Sasso says the team is not interested in commercial flavors aimed at kids. “You see fluorescent flavors named after superheroes and video game characters. Those aren’t flavors,” he says. “Those are just colors of milk.”
Instead, the family’s goal is to take classic tastes and push them as far as they can go. “The flavors are really intense because the ingredients are intense,” Sasso says. Part of that intensity comes from the gelato itself: typically lower in butterfat than American-style ice cream and churned with less air, giving it a denser texture. It’s also served at a warmer temperature than ice cream, allowing the flavors to come through more clearly. Butter pecan is rich, studded with chopped pecans. Mint chip tastes more like fresh mint leaves than candy-store mint, while the chocolate has the deep, creamy pull of frozen hot chocolate. The sorbets deserve their own mention, too. On a recent visit, the passionfruit scoop was bright and clean, with the tartness of fresh pulp in every bite.
Freshness is a major part of the plan. Without much storage space at Sobrinos, ingredients move quickly, and Sasso says the gelato is spun fresh every day. As the seasons move, the case will move with them, with strawberries, corn, stone fruit, and cucumber sorbet on his mind for summer. The team also plans to bring more of Rosie’s bakery life across the street, from toasted baguette and croissant-flavored ice creams to brioche ice cream sandwiches and jam-swirled flavors made with preserves they put up last summer.
“Little by little, you’re going to start seeing that,” Sasso says. “We really want to take it in steps and start with gelato and sorbet.”
For now, Sobrinos feels both new and immediately familiar, a place for kids, grandparents, post-dinner wanderers, and anyone who knows a good scoop can improve any day. And like Rosie, the shop keeps the work visible. Customers can see past the case and into the making of the place, a choice Sasso says has followed him through his whole career.
“I’ve never cooked behind a wall,” he says. “We want that consumer interaction and we want to be able to talk to people and have them see everything that we do. We’re not hiding anything.”
Sobrinos Gelato is open Thursday-Saturday, 2-8 p.m. and Sunday, 2-6 p.m.
