East Dupont Circle’s Gemini x Happy Ice Cream About Us page neatly captures the joint’s zeitgeist: We’re a natural wine shop where you can get dinner and ice cream, brought to you by a James Beard Award-winning team. In France they’d call us a cave à manger.1 These two simple sentences say it all: Highfalutin wine, dinner as an afterthought, a self-important chef, and French pretentiousness.
Chef Johnny Monis of Komi and Little Serow fame runs this peculiar restaurant– natural wine shop with his wife, Anne Marler. Fair warning: mixing a foodie like Johnny Monis with a philistine like DishingPizza is like inviting a baboon to a tea party.
Although Gemini’s write-up claims it’s a chill, laissez-faire2 affair, it’s just the opposite — a rule-bound, persnickety fussbudget:
- Rule #1: A customer may not drink a glass of wine on the premises after 5:00 without ordering dinner.
- Rule #2: “Handmade pasta is our love language. Our pastas are limited, small-batch items available ~inside only~.” This rule isn’t explained, but it’s firm – no eating pasta ($19 – $28 for a minuscule portion) on the patio or for carryout. One may surmise that the pasta is too delicate to survive the arduous voyage down the walk-up’s stairs to the sidewalk patio in front, much less hold up to the rigorous journey to an Adams Morgan third-floor walk-up.
- Rule #3: Carryout must be ordered online. One may not walk in and order food to take away. This one’s a puzzler, but it’s probably because Gemini needs a few hours upfront to determine if the carryout customer is worthy of its food.
- Rule #4: No chairs. The high tables inside lack chairs. If a diner wants to sit down to enjoy their $25 pasta, $16 vegetable, and $15 glass of wine, they’re being unreasonable — after all, this is a cave à manger.3
- Rule #5: “We have a teeny patio with a handful of small tables. The largest group we can accommodate on the patio is 2. Order inside at the counter first, then we’ll help you find a spot. Please do not seat yourself.“
Natch, DishingPizza didn’t come for the pasta or the wine — pizza and beer for DishingPizza. Gemini only offers one canned beer — with a chaser of sneering derision. After ordering a half pizza ($18 or a whopping $0.25/square inch), an employee began an awkward conversation: “Will you be eating inside or outside?” “Outside.” “Is it just you?” “No, I’m eating with someone else.” “Where is that person?” “They’re outside.” “Uh, okay.” I’m not sure what the employee was getting at, but they’re rabid that anyone occupying a seat must be eating dinner and even more insistent that one person of a party may not squat at a table before ordering (see rule #5).
One might imagine with all of these rules and regs, that DishingPizza went in with a bad attitude. Au contraire. DishingPizza is willing to put up with beaucoup disrespect if the pizza is good enough, and Gemini has a great rep and pedigree.
Sadly, the Gemini pizza, which looks so inviting, is a mixed bag. Technically, Gemini pizza has all the traits of Sicilian pizza: a thick, airy crust, a slightly oily bottom, and a layer of mozzarella beneath a herbaceous tomato sauce. However, anyone who grew up in New Jersey and hung out playing Pac-Man in strip mall pizzerias run by actual Italians would not recognize Gemini’s foodie, dainty treatment as Sicilian. It’s too delicate and too careful, whereas New Jersey Sicilian is a more haphazard pie. None of this, however, is a Gemini disqualifier. They say that it’s the sauce that makes or breaks the Sicilian pie, and it breaks Gemini’s. The garlicky, rich tomato sauce has two problems: It leaves a bad aftertaste, and It’s incredibly and unnecessarily salty.
One way to expunge a bad aftertaste is with just desserts, and this is where the second, equally overpriced Happy half of Gemini shines. Happy Ice Cream4 serves $16 pints5 indoors and $7 for a perfectly round baseball-sized scoop ($10 for a double scoop and an additional $1 for a handmade cone) from an adorable old-fashioned outdoor ice cream cart. The absurdity of a $7 scoop notwithstanding, Happy produces unusual flavors with fresh ingredients. DishingPizza witnessed two customers attempting to share a cone with spoons, knocking the hard ice cream ball onto the sidewalk twice consecutively. Both times, the server graciously replaced the spilled scoops.
- Unwritten Rule #6: If the hard ice cream ball rolls off the handmade cone, you will not be forced to eat it off the ground. You are eligible to receive a replacement, gratis, provided that you also imagine Johnny Monis’s tsking reprimand when he comes out in a huff, informing you that ice cream doesn’t grow on trees.
There are plenty of connoisseurs who extol the excellence of Gemini’s pastas and appetizers. They also advise customers not to fill up with the bready pizza because the ramekins of appetizers and thimblefuls of pasta are so superb. DishingPizza concludes that such a minimalist, precious, expensive restaurant is anathema to its mission of finding the best hole-in-the-wall pizzerias in the DMV.
Gemini x Happy Ice Cream
1509 17th St NW, Washington, DC 20036
Style: Sicilian
Pizza quality: 🍕🍕🍕
Overall experience: ⭐⭐
Pie (12″ square): $30.00
Pie price per square inch: $0.21
- For the reprobates who don’t know French, it’s a hybrid wine shop and relaxed eatery where you can buy a bottle of wine at retail shelf price and drink it right there with a small corkage fee, accompanied by simple, high-quality food. In Gemini’s case, the corkage fee is $20. ↩︎
- Yes, they really refer to the vibe as laissez-faire. Any place that feels the need to point this out is decidedly NOT laissez-faire. ↩︎
- Because Gemini operates out of a historic, tight Dupont Circle space, the ADA does not legally force them to destroy the building’s facade to build a ramp or install an elevator. The accessible outdoor patio, which has chairs, serves as an equalizer, provided that diners are offered the same menu indoors and outdoors. This means that Gemini must begrudgingly serve pasta outside to disabled customers. ↩︎
- Named by the Washington Post as one of the 7 U.S. Ice Cream Shops to Build a Vacation Around, as if this place needed an additional stroke of its ego. ↩︎
- For comparison, a 1.5-quart (3 pints) container of Breyers can be purchased for $3.00 on sale. This makes Happy Ice Cream 16 times more expensive than Breyers. Yes, Happy is better than Breyers, but is it 16 times better? Not if we’re talking Breyers Sundae Swirls Salted Caramel Truffle. ↩︎