Engineering a minuscule treat
How one ice-cream-loving MIT graduate student invented the perfect cool dessert
CAMBRIDGE -- While he was an engineering graduate student at MIT, Kevin Brown installed a larger-than-life sound system at Toscanini Ice Cream's former location in Kendall Square. In exchange, owner Gus Rancatore gave the ice-cream-loving regular a "Free Anything Card." It meant, essentially, free ice cream for life.
Understanding the power and danger of the card, Brown was forced to practice self-restraint. Now the card holder, who is 39, is president of Brown Innovations Inc., a Boston-based sound engineering firm. But he still finds time to go to his favorite ice cream shop. "There's got to be a limit when things are free," explains Brown. So he decided to eat small portions. On a typical visit, he would help himself to a 2-inch paper espresso cup filled with ice cream, smothered in hot fudge, and topped with a tiny hood of whipped cream.
And so the "micro-sundae," as Brown called it, was born.
The engineer had been making himself the micro-sundae for more than five years before it reached Toscanini's blackboard menu. By then, he and Rancatore had become close friends. "Gus and I talked a lot about business," Brown explains. "We bounced ideas off one another."
According to Brown, ice cream lovers everywhere needed to taste Toscanini's thick, velvety, bittersweet homemade hot fudge sauce. Since Rancatore said that lowering the price of a regular-size sundae to compete with the cost of a scoop of ice
cream wasn't feasible, Brown suggested that the shop offer a micro-sundae. At first, Rancatore had a hard time with the concept. Brown explains, "Gus was concerned that the sundae would overflow and that people wouldn't buy it. `Why would you buy that when you could have a bigger one?' " Finally Rancatore rationalized offering the micro-sundae because he thought it might appeal to kids. The price is $3.
But "it's generally not kids who order them," says Tara Sadooghi, an employee at the Central Square Toscanini's. Micro-sundae customers turn out to be adults satisfying their post-dinner chocolate craving with this small treat. Sadooghi explains the typical reaction: "At first people are like, `Oh, that's really micro.' But then they eat it and they don't feel so sick to their stomachs. It's the perfect size, the perfect amount."
Despite the owner's worries, Toscanini's employees do like to overfill the tiny cup, placing a pint lid underneath to catch every last drop. "You want to give people what they expect," says Sadooghi.
Although conceived to promote Toscanini's hot fudge, the micro has become a smaller-is-better dessert. Rancatore says that Brown created "something that was more like an appetizer, a tasting." Today people can buy the micro at Toscanini's and at Rancatore's Ice Cream in Belmont -- owned by Gus Rancatore's brother, Joe. (At Rancatore's in Belmont the micro is $3.75.) In either shop, you can create your own combination -- with hot fudge, butterscotch, nuts, and candy, with or without whipped cream.
With the success of the micro, Brown continues to invent creative concepts for Gus Rancatore, including different ways to market the hot fudge. He has one big idea that he's keeping to himself, but he did offer this hint: "Combining hot and cold provides an energy source that you could do something fun with."
The engineer and the ice cream entrepreneur have been tossing around more innovations. If the micro-sundae is not small enough for you, says Rancatore, "plans are now in the works for a nano-sundae -- a sundae on an edible spoon."
There's no telling how small they will go.
Micro-sundaes are at Toscanini's Ice Cream, 899 Main St., Central Square, Cambridge, 617-491-5877, and 1310 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge, 617-354-9350; and at Rancatore's Ice Cream, 238 Belmont St., Belmont, 617-489-5090. 