After 22 years, the founders of Dolcezza, a D.C.-born string of gelato and coffee shops, feel like they’re hustling harder than they ever have before. In the past two years, husband-and-wife team Robb Duncan and Violeta Edelman opened their sixth scoop
shop on H Street (a marked victory as many local brands were closing); rolled out incredibly popular soft serve machines at three locations; and launched a soft serve sundae collaboration series with top culinary names that incorporated toppings ranging from crispy phyllo dough from pastry chef Alicia Wang (Yellow) to Jimmy Nardello pepper jam and eggplant chocolate sauce from chef Jon Sybert (Rye Bunny).
In early December, Dolcezza will truly return to its roots with a marquee corner location in Georgetown that is three times the size of its very first shop in the neighborhood, which closed in 2018 after serving Guatemalan espresso and daily-churned gelato for 14 years. Unlike that tucked-away launch pad, this new Georgetown flagship sits on a busier nexus of Wisconsin Avenue (300 Wisconsin Avenue NW).
“It’s the whole return home, Homer and the Odyssey, that we come back to Georgetown as well,” Duncan tells Eater. “Coming back to Georgetown, where it all began, is such a significant and beautiful moment for us.” He still reflects on the early days of making every pan of the light, creamy dessert fresh in the mornings with machines shipped from Argentina and getting to meet D.C. chefs at the farmer’s markets on the weekends.
While moving into soft serve and collaborating with beloved local chefs like José Andrés to make olive oil-flavored soft serve sundaes might seem like a move out of left field, Duncan says that he’s ready to innovate and expand the Dolcezza brand even more in the next year. Duncan spent 10 years building out a wholesale side to the business, including pints at Whole Foods nationwide in 2023, but decided to pull back from the packaged goods expansion.
“We’re post-going national with Whole Foods and really seeing the inside of the consumer packaged goods industry and not really liking it at all, because it’s such a different world than this small family local business,” he says. “Now being able to come back and really focus on our team, our kitchen, our supply chain of farmers, and then start to grow from the inside out … we’re super excited.”
That includes expanding further at the Hirshhorn Museum, where Dolcezza has operated a coffee, gelato, and pastry counter in the museum’s front entry and in a converted outdoor storage container since 2018. Duncan is working again with architect Hiroshi Sugimoto to build a custom container in the newly designed sculpture garden, surrounded by freestanding stone walls handpicked from a quarry in Massachusetts. They plan to open up the new outpost by cherry blossom season in March 2027.
“We’ll turn it on for coffee and gelato and possibly other offerings to be a part of the garden and work with the Hirshhorn Museum, the Smithsonian, and activate that with events,” he explained.
First, he wants to bring in the farmers he’s been working with for the past two decades, including Amish farmer Omar Beiler of Roam Dairy, from whom he started buying 200 gallons of milk a week a few years ago. Now, he’s not only buying 1,500 gallons of milk a week from the Pennsylvania farm to make his gelato and soft serve, but Beiler’s son, Jr., is growing 2,000 pounds of crookneck heirloom pumpkins used for a pumpkin spice coffee syrup and gelato.
Its connection to farmers and local chefs feels more important than ever for the Dolcezza owners.
After returning to Georgetown, Dolcezza wants to refocus on its original goal of using high-quality ingredients that span from hard-to-get Sicilian Bronte pistachios to ceremonial-grade matcha from Rocky’s Matcha. “We’re actually able to double down on quality, go even more hardcore on the quality because we have this volume thing,” Duncan says.
Dolcezza, like many other mom-and-pop shops around D.C., condensed its portfolio during the pandemic. Now Wisconsin Avenue’s frozen swirl scene is booming, especially with Greek options. There’s the year-old Yala Greek Ice Cream directly across the street and a frozen yogurt store, Olli, which debuted last month.
Beyond the shops, Duncan is planning to open up their massive factory in Union Market, which is used now for special pop-ups, as a sit-down dessert and coffee pad with gelato tasting flights of daily-made seasonal flavors and pastry chef residencies with special weekend soft serve flavors. Duncan says the “experimental dessert lab” will hopefully open its doors in summer 2027 as well.
Despite all the growth, Duncan truly believes they are “just coming back to where we started.” He says all the projects coming up “just feel right and obviously when you go and launch something new like this, it’s very important to have that feeling.”
