Davvero Gelato opens in Lakeside

In Richmond, a city for ice cream lovers, there’s a new gelato spot in Lakeside.

Davvero Gelato, owned by Richmond native Layne Montgomery, is the first brick-and-mortar shop selling the same homemade, gluten-free (most items are gluten-free) vegan gelato she sold out of an ice cream cart that she’s been operating since 2020. Be warned if you have nut allergies though: many of Montgomery’s flavors are nut-based.

The shop is located at 6931 Lakeside Ave. in the Hub Shopping Center, which is also home to SB’s Lakeside Love Shack.

On the menu, you’ll find seasonal ice cream flavors made in-house. Look out for pistachio, chocolate hazelnut cream, or peanut butter stracciatella, among others. Gelato is sold by the scoop in small ($4.50), medium ($6.50) and large ($8.50) sizes.

As we move into fall, she’ll start serving drinking chocolate, sahlab, which is a Turkish drinkable pudding, and affogatos, which are frozen espresso drinks made with ice cream. She will also be serving her Italian-inspired ice cream sandwich, which is gelato pressed between two slices of toasted brioche bread called a gelato panini. In October, Davvero Gelato will be introducing an espresso menu with hot and cold espresso ice cream drinks.

“When I first went to Italy and stayed for a summer, I fell in love with gelato and wanted to open up a gelateria,” Montgomery said. “For the next decade, I lived in Turkey and traveled through Europe and Italy and still always thought that it would be really cool to open a gelateria in Richmond.”

Montgomery moved back to Richmond after taking a course on gelato making in Bologna, Italy, and started her ice cream cart as a sidewalk vendor, traveling to pop-ups throughout the Lakeside neighborhood where people fell in love with her pistachio flavor, which is dairy free and vegan, and made from raw pistachios ground into a paste before being integrated into the ice cream. She also makes her own hazelnut cream, called gianduia, which was invented in Turin, during Napoleon’s reign. It tastes like Nutella on steroids—totally heavenly. She uses this for her hazelnut-based flavors.

All the ingredients that go into each scoop are made in-house and the gelato itself is made entirely in-house, in the 480-square-feet that is Montgomery’s storefront.

The storefront is for counter service only, with no inside seating. There will be an outdoor seating area to the rear of the storefront that should be completed by this fall.

Montgomery’s ice cream cart is still in operation and operates mainly in Libby Hill park. It can also be booked for weddings and special events. The cart works in tandem with the shop, traveling back and forth from the site to the storefront to get another load of assorted gelato flavors to sell to passersby.

“The main selling point is that it’s really good quality, and my standard is what you’d get in Italy,” Montgomery said. “If I’m doing a drinking chocolate, it’s what you’d get in Europe. But as a bonus, it happens to be vegan as well. I like to approach it like that because I have a nice mix of regulars who aren’t vegan at all, who just like the product.”