Rita’s Is My 26-Year-Old Ritual

I’ve eaten no fewer than 26 orders of Rita’s gelati in my life, but almost certainly far more. I’ve had at least one each summer since the year I moved to this country, right into the heart of water ice territory (Pennsylvania). In most places, Rita’s is known as Rita’s Italian Ice. Where I’m from, it’ll never be anything but water ice, though I never quite picked up the accent to prove it.

The gelati, as defined by Rita’s, solves the problem of having to choose between water ice, which is the chain’s flagship product, and custard, which is inarguably its better option. The latter is so thick it would pass the flip test if this were another nostalgic frozen-dessert chain. The gelati is both at once: a foundation of custard, a thick middle of water ice, a final swirl of custard at the top. It’s the best thing at Rita’s — for me, as much a marker of the season as hearing the twinkling tones of the ice cream truck or eating a tomato sandwich.

At this point, I should have a ranking. I should be able to state with certainty the best flavor to pair with chocolate, the best with vanilla. I should have realized that you can swirl the two. Rita’s has been hard at work on its menu; there was no Sour Patch Kids watermelon nor “mermaid” gelati when I was growing up. But I’ve only ever had one order. When I was little, I chose chocolate water ice with chocolate custard, because I was the age when my praxis was “More chocolate is always better,” and then I never changed my mind again. My gelati is no longer a choice but an inevitability, the same way I know that I’ll get sand in my beach BLT.

You can eat a gelati by burrowing straight down to strike the lower layer of custard, spoonful by spoonful, or you can excavate it one layer at a time. I’m a burrower; I want a little bit of everything at once. The gelati offers a few distinct textures, and I like how the distinct layers custard and Italian ice bleed together without the homogeneity of a Blendini, Rita’s offering which blends custard and water ice into a uniform texture. On top, is custard in its purest form, a thick and perfect dollop. Beneath it is pure slush, crystals that almost crackle when they come into contact with teeth. Below that lies custard that’s softened and pliable like stirred ice cream. It mixes slightly with the melting slush; this is, after all, exactly where you put your utensil. Burrow a spoon down, and melted gelati pools in the opening. That’s my favorite part: slurpable syrup that tastes like a cold, liquified Tootsie Roll.

At most places, I don’t order the same thing twice, and that’s if I even go back more than once. I’m drawn to variety and compelled by novelty. At Rita’s, however, I require repetition, not just in flavor but also in experience. This is the ideal Rita’s experience: I must drive there in a car; I must order a gelati and then wrap a few napkins around it, preventing both melting and stickiness; then I must eat my gelati while sitting in the car’s popped trunk. Rita’s, to me, is meant to be eaten in a parking lot, and for this reason, I see it as an exclusively suburban pleasure. I only visit it when I’m home, by which I mean Southeastern Pennsylvania.

It feels funny to call it “home” when I haven’t lived there in over a decade. A lot has changed. Walmarts and Wawas have replaced the empty lots. Vape stores fill up old storefronts. Still, every time I go back, I’m shocked by how much is the same. The strip-mall salons and pizza joints persist. The mall maintains its imposing presence. The diners look as anachronistic as they ever did. So many former classmates still live nearby that I walk through grocery stores warily. What becomes clear in these circumstances is how much I’ve changed: how wide the gap has grown between the self I am in the moment, and the self I remember who lived here, the one who saw no other place as home.

Every gelati is different in the way that the teenagers working at Rita’s are always replaced by another set of teenagers. Its melting quickens or slows depending on the weather, or how hungry I am. But every gelati is also effectively the same. Or at least, it conjures the same experience. Eating it, I remember that I was 6, with my parents in this exact parking lot. Then, the concept of “water ice” was still as weird to us as the idea of Wal-Mart (Did they sell walls? I remember thinking when my dad, full of immigrant eagerness, suggested we go there for the first time), or the way locals referred to the creek (“crick”), or how they asked “How’s it going?” (“What’s ‘it’?” we thought).

In this parking lot, I eat my gelati overlooking the set of orange traffic pylons where I learned to parallel park. With a spoonful, suddenly I’m 16. My dad is telling me to cut the wheel to the left once my shoulder passes the pylon. The green station wagon awkwardly clunks into place. I’m 26 here too, visiting with my now-husband. He’s never quite gotten the appeal of Rita’s, but he always indulges my nostalgia tour anyway.

In another Rita’s parking lot, the one that’s on the crest of the hill next to my high school, I eat the gelati while watching the sunset. I was 17 here, getting dessert on my way home from Key Club meetings. Then, I was 20, visiting with the few high school friends I’d still catch up with over breaks, before that fateful moment when one of us decided to come home without texting the other. I remember how, at that point, we were more likely to drive by this parking lot past-closing; we preferred to hang out at the hookah bar.

I was 24 here too, when my family and I got Rita’s to commemorate my sibling’s graduation. I remember the feeling of untethering: Soon, they’d be leaving town, one thing keeping me rooted vanishing.

In Pennsylvania now, I am too aware that there is no way to ever go back to feeling rooted. It is a home, but it is not my home and likely won’t be ever again. Home is New York City, where instead of water ice we have a cavalcade of competing ice cream trucks. Here, I say I’m not a “dessert person,” forgoing it most of the time. Even when I do get dessert, I almost never choose chocolate anymore. That I feel so out of place in Pennsylvania these days is a reality softened by the understanding that there is a place where I feel entirely myself — this other home that I’ve chosen and built.

And of course, there is the gelati. It’s always the same gelati, just as it is always almost exactly the same view, though the bowling alley across the street is now a car dealership. When these pieces of summer are the same, it feels easier for me to be the thing that’s different. I’ll eat the same chocolate gelati at 36 as I did when I was 6. The gelati is a tether. It awakens and allows me to move through all these memories.

This gelati is not ultimately a forgone conclusion, I know. I am capable of choosing differently. I am, after all, a different person. But by giving up my control over this one little thing, I give myself the gift of another feeling: that I can freeze-frame, rewind, and stop time, even if only for as long as it takes water ice to melt. In all those memories, I wouldn’t change a thing.