Eight years ago, I came to San Francisco with a dream: to bring real Italian gelato, made the way I grew up eating it, to a city I fell in love with. I opened GIO Gelati on Union Street in Marina, not really knowing what to expect. What I found was a city that welcomed me like family.

Today it truly is a family business. My daughter Teresa joined me and she is now our gelato chef. She carries my same stubbornness and adds to it the creativity to truly elevate our product. Watching her perfect her craft has been one of the great joys of my life.

At the beginning of the year, a leak from the apartment above our shop flooded our store. The building was closed immediately. We were told it would take a couple of months to repair. It has now been eight months, and we are still waiting.

Our old shop was not only where we sold our gelato. It was also our production kitchen facility, where we made all our products for our store, for the grocery stores that carry our gelato, and for every event we catered.

Since then, we have been working out of a temporary kitchen with very limited hours to keep the production going. It has allowed us to stay afloat, but has meant working long hours, with limited control, often at night.

We have decided we cannot keep waiting for the building to be fixed. We have began working on a dedicated production lab, and are now moving forward with a new home in Marina.

Building a new lab and a new storefront at the same time, while still running on a limited temporary setup, is a lot to manage on our own.

Since the flood, so many of you have reached out asking how you can help.

Rebuilding GIO Gelati from the ground up is a massive undertaking, and we would be deeply honored to have you by our side as we make our way back to Marina.

If you are able to help, your support will go toward opening and equipping our new location in Marina, completing our production lab and getting our full team back to work as soon as possible. Just as important, it will help us keep making gelato exactly the way we always have, with Californian ingredients, true seasonality, and no compromises.

We came to San Francisco to build something real. We found real community.

We like to think GIO Gelati has grown into a cherished part of the neighborhood, and we ask that same community that welcomed us from the start, to help open our doors again.