Beautiful Spaces: Moro Gelato

WORDS Lindi Brownell Meiring IMAGES Jan Ras

Moro Gelato, well-known around Cape Town for its mouthwatering flavour combinations, has opened a (seriously) pretty shop on Long Street.

Designed by co-owners Stefano Moro and Heine van Wyk, the pretty interiors of the boutique store are inspired by their adventures abroad. “We’ve both been traveling around the world appreciating art and architecture throughout our lives,” says Heine. “I worked in Milano for a design company, dealing with AutoCAD and other programs, so the step between imagining and creating wasn’t far.”

Moro Gelato’s new home needed to be more than a simple brick-and-mortar space – it needed to have character. “At 165, we found a shop that was tiny, but where time had given a sense of life to the walls.”

To ensure customers enjoy their experience of the shop from the moment they walk in, the space was designed with relaxation top of mind. This in turn influenced the wall’s gentle, calming colour palette, which Heine and the team painted themselves. “Our desire is to welcome people and make them feel free to taste what we make,” says Heine. “We wanted a space that complements our gelato, where the wall and cup colours don’t overpower the natural tones of our ingredients, like the light green of the pistachio or the beige of our natural hazelnut. The strongest colours in our shop will always be the natural shades of the seasonal fruits we use for our gelato.”

The gelato at Moro is made in the traditional Italian way. “Our creative roots are deeply connected to that country,” says Heine. “One day during a trip to Cremona (one of the capitals of food in Italy) we stumbled upon the most beautiful pastry and sweets shop, Pasticceria Lanfranchi, dating back to the 1800s. We immediately felt a connection to that shop, one of the most elegant we’ve ever seen, with an offering of the best food products in the region. It became a natural prerequisite that the home for Moro Gelato should be as refined as the passion we put into our hand-made products.”

Marchese, one of Moro’s most popular gelato choices, featuring a combination of Tahitian Vanilla, macadamia nut butter and caramelised almonds, is the flavour that Heine thinks best describes the design of the space. “It has a very gentle creamy colour, broken by details of crushed nuts. At the first bite there’s the surprise of the richness of the flavour, then the combination of the ingredients develops into a harmony that leaves you with a good memory of our gelato. We put in a lot of work in our kitchen and certainly Marchese is one of the flavours that require lots of attention to detail –  we even caramelise the almonds ourselves”. 

Moro Gelato is located at 165 Long Street, Cape Town. The shop is open from 11am until 6pm Monday to Friday. Visit morogelato.co.za for more information and to find out more about the flavours on offer.