There are Torontonians who make and sell gelato and others who are un vero gelatiere. There is a difference. Your Gelato’s Gent Dakoli is one of those people, a true gelato maker. His shop at 2009 Avenue Road reflects his passion, with flavours brimming with excellent depth, taste, texture and balanced ingredients. He is definitely not one of the apparently 80 per cent of TO gelaterias who order flavour mixes from Italy, then add the base and sell it. Dakoli is a make-it-yourself kind of proprietor. (The Italian flavours are the real thing but using them lacks a certain artisanal something).

“I use zero mixes,” Dakoli said. “Everything is made right here in this store.”

He was very proud to show me his back shop, with packages of frozen Ontario strawberries, guava from Colombia and Chilean raspberries. His sorbets are made with three types of sugar, including trehalose, available from only one company, Japan’s Hayashibara, which made this hard-to-extract sugar, available worldwide. It adds to water retention and mouth feel, and Your Gelato must be one of the few shops to deploy it.

His flavours are exceptional. Pistachio and hazelnut offer that creamy feel and bold nutty flavour without being overbearing. Tiramisu looks and tastes like the real thing. His success with a basic flavour like Vanilla reflects how serious his efforts are. The chocolate almond is superior. Fruit sorbets are bursting with their origins — an unusual one I tried, lime and mint had the herb leaves mixed in and displayed just the right amount of tartness.

He sells a great deal of crème brulée, modeled after his mother’s crème caramel. Lavender is tricky, as it uses honey, a difficult cold ingredient. Some flavours on rotation I would have liked to try included:

• Ricotta, Honey and Pistachio
• Goat Cheese and Pecan
• Goat Cheese and Blueberry Jam
• Fromage Blanc and Apricot Jam

There are also gelato cakes and smoothies, outdoor seating and a plain but serviceable interior. It could use some work.

Goat’s milk, an unusual ingredient, perhaps reflects Dakoli’s origin in Albania, a tiny country of 2.8 million lively souls on the Balkan Peninsula, bordering Greece and North Macedonia. It gave the world Dua Lipa, Mother Teresa and the Belushi brothers, John and Jim.

As a kind of crossroads for the world, it has been occupied by foreign forces many times and like most of Eastern Europe, after World War II, fell to a communist dictatorship that lasted until 1991, when that part of the world threw off the socialist yoke and returned to various levels of freedom. Dakoli, a trained chemical engineer, came here to Canada to avoid the political unrest and worked in banking and distributing wine and spirits for a decade and a half until he had that mid-life crisis moment where he contemplated what he would do for the rest of his life. Gelato was the answer, and he even earned a certificate from Bologna’s Gelato University. There really is one. I’d love to go there!

He wanted to do something fun! And one of the first questions he asked me was:

“You mean you do this for fun,” meaning Ricardo’s Gelato blog.

“Yes I do,” I told him, then I seemed to be in his good graces. Kindred spirits. Not doing something just for money. “There isn’t that much in gelato,” he said.

One of the challenging parts of any gelato operation is maintaining flavours at the right consistency for scooping and consuming. Think of it as a room full of unruly children, each with his own little bout of misbehaviour.

As Dakoli explains it: “It’s not a precise science so requires a great deal of experimentation. You start with some similarities in chemical composition but the then the sugars, dairy ingredients make it a challenge. Each flavour has to be at their peak for customers.”

All in all, it’s worth your while to take a trip up to upper Avenue Road; besides Your Gelato, there are a number of interesting restaurants up there like Francobollo, a sister spot to Thornhill’s Terra and Dave’s Genuine Deli for outstanding Montreal smoked meat, before you move up to Your Gelato for dessert.