delicious. 2016 PRODUCE AWARDS WINNER
PHOTOGRAPHS MARK BENHAM
The Conti family story is the stuff of legend. In the 1930s, Artillio Conti made the journey from northern Italy to Wales – on foot. He was just 13 and the Italian economy was on its knees.
The trees sprouted tall and straight in the hills above Parma where he grew up – just the thing to shore up the thriving Welsh coal mines. Walking alongside the horse and cart full of logs, Artillio “followed the wood”, as his granddaughter Jo tells me, to the Valleys. Instead of making the return journey home, Artillio stayed, opening the first Conti café with his two brothers.
The trio went on to own 17 cafés in Wales and in 1946 began producing their own ice cream. Today, Lampeter is home to the last of the original, old-style Conti cafés. It’s owned by Jo, whose son Tom Lewis is chief ice cream maker. His girlfriend Heulwen is the café manager.
Lampeter is a small university town with an independent spirit. When I arrived I strolled past locally owned cafés, a traditional butcher and a department store complete with regal royal-blue awning. Conti’s café sits on a roundabout in the middle of the high street. Within minutes I was seated at a comfortable wooden table with a cup of tea and plate of cheese on toast, chatting to Jo and Heulwen.
“It’s quite a tale,” agrees Jo, recounting in a soft Welsh accent her grandfather’s passage. “Can you imagine it happening these days? But the Welsh landscape was similar so it felt homely to them.” The ice cream went down a storm with the miners too. “They used to get really dusty throats, so when they’d come up from the mines the ice cream was soothing,” she says.
Jo was born upstairs in the Lampeter café, which her father Leno ran until he was in his 90s. She helped out from a young age, clearing tables and selling cigarettes.
It’s a place where memories have been made for countless locals, and students who, years later, return from around the world to reminisce and eat the ice cream once more. The interior was famous for having barely been altered since it opened – until last September, that is.
“This is seriously luxurious… You can really taste the cream and milk, and it’s not too sweet”