Cono: the Canis chefs are back on College Street, and they’re scooping gelato

The first thing I ate at Cono was a scoop of Basque cheesecake gelato, and I have been thinking about it since. It is the only flavour on the counter built on a custard base, cream cheese cooked into eggs and cream, and folded through it are sheets of Basque cheesecake baked thin, barely thicker than a crêpe, so that almost all of it is scorched surface. You get the burnt-sugar edge of a cheesecake in every spoonful without any of the density. I bought a pint on the way out. Then I went back for the peach sorbet, which tastes so aggressively of peach it feels like a trick.

Fifteen years and four kitchens together

There is no trick. Jeff Kang and Tosh Agassiz have been cooking together since 2011, when they met at Diva at the Met in Vancouver, Jeff as sous-chef and Tosh as chef de partie. Jeff went east first, to Bosk at the Shangri-La in Toronto; Tosh followed a year later. Three years after that they opened Canis, ran it for four and a half years, and closed it when COVID hit. Gelato had been a running conversation between them the whole time. “Every time I travel, I look for gelato shops,” Jeff says. A trip to Spain two years ago gave Tosh the counter format, the glass-topped display with the lid that lifts. A more recent trip to Australia sent Jeff through Gelato Messina, which has grown large enough to run its own dairy farm.

Minus 12, and almost no eggs

What they have landed on sits deliberately between two things. Traditional gelato has less fat than ice cream and less air, and it is served warmer, around minus 12 instead of the minus 18 or minus 20 of a standard freezer, so the flavour reads clearly on the tongue. Cono’s is a little richer than the Italian standard and still denser and colder-tasting than any ice cream. Most importantly, apart from that cheesecake, there are no eggs. “To make a strawberry ice cream taste intensely of strawberry is super hard,” Tosh says. “You’re not diluting all that flavour with egg.”

Canis desserts, scooped

The other half of the idea comes from North American ice cream: inclusions, folded through, rather than a single clean note. So the salted caramel arrives shot through with miso blondie, a brownie stripped of chocolate and seasoned into something salty and savoury. The sunflower sorbet gets stracciatella, shards of chocolate, which is a dessert they used to plate at Canis. The 70% chocolate, the most expensive of the many they tasted, eats like fudge. Sweet corn is made by cutting kernels off the cob and steeping the stripped cobs in the milk and cream, and it will disappear when the corn does. Buckwheat is coming, along with maple syrup from Tamarack Farms, and Jeff is angling for carrot cake.

Thursday to Sunday, with a restaurant going up out back

They are open Thursday through Sunday, three to ten, on College Street, with flavours posted daily online and a menu on the wall outside so the line moves. It topped out around half an hour on opening weekend. Worth knowing: Canis is being rebuilt in the courtyard behind the shop, roughly a year out.

Written by Daniel Neuhaus
Photography by Daniel Neuhaus

Updated on August 27, 2026

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