A fixture of second-wave coffee shops, the iconic Torani pumps deserve a closer look, and possibly a revival.
In our ever-globalizing world, the phrase “Italian soda” might make you think of squat bottles of imported red Sanbittèr, or cola-colored chinotto, a bitter orange soda you can reliably find at Eataly. Or it might call to mind American upstart brands like Ghia and Casamara Club, which sell nonalcoholic sodas crafted to taste like Italian aperitivi. But back before Americans were hip to amaro, a rapidly growing category in the current bar game, “Italian soda” was a much simpler luxury: a signifier of European sophistication for American teens awkwardly socializing on corduroy sofas at small-town coffee shops. It was a plastic cup full of ice, seltzer, and a pump—and boy were there a lot of pumps—of whichever flavored syrup behind the espresso bar caught your eye.
“Italian soda is almost like the amaro and soda of my youth,” says Dominique Montgomery, an Instagram acquaintance of mine who grew up ordering raspberry Italian sodas at a coffee bar in Blacksburg, Virginia. “I think something about ordering them felt very grown up at the time, even though I don’t think I was cognizant of cocktails yet.”
“Italian sodas were definitely a midmorning or midafternoon pick-me-up on a hot day, and almost always ordered by women,” recalls author and TASTE contributor Priyanka Mattoo, who worked at a coffee shop called Cava Java in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the late ’90s. “Obviously, many days in Ann Arbor were bitingly cold, so students would do anything to celebrate the temperature rising above 50 [degrees].”
“Italian soda” was a much simpler luxury: a signifier of European sophistication for American teens awkwardly socializing on corduroy sofas at small-town coffee shops.
Writer and podcast host Miranda Rake remembers growing up in Portland, Oregon, with a stepmom who had “a pretty major Torani collection that was maybe a status symbol for a certain kind of ’90s Nordstrom mom.” Since Rake’s stepmother didn’t drink alcohol, the array of syrups became its own sort of “home bar,” as Rake describes it, and it meant that they could offer dinner guests the occasional Italian soda.
The basic formula for this drink was introduced to the United States in 1925, when Italian immigrants Rinaldo and Ezilda Torre began making lemon, grenadine, anisette, tamarindo, and orgeat syrups in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. The Torres sold their syrups to local restaurants in their Italian neighborhood, launching the company Torani, whose colorfully striped bottles of syrup are still ubiquitous today.
“They used syrup, mixed it with carbonated water, and created that traditional Italian soda,” says Andrea Ramirez, who works in market insights at Torani, which is now based in San Leandro and sells more than 150 different syrups. Ramirez remembers her father telling her about ordering a crème de menthe Italian soda at a club he worked at in the ’50s in Palo Alto, and she recalls having her own Italian soda for the first time at a bakery called Just Desserts in San Francisco.
In the early ’90s, as second-wave coffee shops like Peet’s and Starbucks proliferated across the United States, Torani’s best-selling product (grenadine, which they sold to bars by the bucket) was eclipsed by the success of its vanilla syrup, which was starting to make its star debut in in the growing latte and cappuccino drinks scene. Ramirez says that, around this time, coffee shops became a social hub for young people, boosted by the popularity of coffee shop–centered TV shows like Friends and movies like Singles. “Coffee shops really became that third place where young people could hang out,” she says.
Throughout the ’90s, coffee shops like the one Mattoo worked in amassed rainbow collections of Torani syrup bottles to correspond with their lengthy menus of hot and iced drinks. A large part of the thrill of ordering one, as I remember from middle school trips to Exquisite Taste, my local suburban coffee shop outside of Buffalo, New York, was the ability to customize your soda order depending on which pump bottles of fruit (or non-fruit) syrup your coffee shop had, usually from a brand like Torani or Monin. When I got a job during college at a second-wave coffee shop in Bronxville, New York, I went on a power trip making weird combinations during slow shifts (ultimately, I realized, it doesn’t get much better than plain strawberry or plain raspberry).
“I loved the lime—it tasted nothing like actual limes and everything like a melted Otter Pop,” Mattoo recalls. “Lime and strawberry was a delicious combination, although it mixed into kind of a gross brown color. One guy asked for a peppermint soda, which I’ve never forgotten—it sounded like drinking toothpaste water? And I had strong opinions about people who went for blue raspberry.”
Chef and food entrepreneur Charlotte Langley remembers making hazelnut Italian sodas for customers at the Second Cup Café where she worked in Ottawa, Canada, in the early aughts. “I liken it to a martini with olives that have been stored in oil,” she says. In an era before Red Bull, she remembers, Second Cup was a popular spot for clubgoers to caffeinate before going out. Some people would pick up Italian sodas to spike with cheap booze.
Ryan Schneider, one of the founders of a newer specialty syrup brand called Proper, points out that when third-wave coffee started to make moves in American culture in the late aughts, syrups became almost taboo. “It was kind of like, you only got to drink your coffee black—no added sweeteners, no added sugars. Flavored drinks were looked down upon,” he says. But even the most serious coffee nerds can appreciate a well-placed touch of vanilla or hazelnut. In the last four or five years, he’s noticed baristas using flavored syrups in creative ways again—making lavender lattes and stratified matcha drinks with strawberry syrup.
Ramirez says that Torani hasn’t explicitly marketed its syrups for Italian sodas in about 12 years, but she’s noticed more consumers buying syrups to use with their home soda machines, to make “waterTok” concoctions, or to transform their Red Bull. “If you would have told me, 15 years ago, that one day people will be putting a bunch of your flavored fruity syrup in Red Bull and making drinks out of it, I would have laughed, but that is an enormous menu category.”
I went on a power trip making weird combinations during slow shifts (ultimately, I realized, it doesn’t get much better than plain strawberry or plain raspberry).
Although second-wave coffee chains can still be readily found across the country, if you walk into a Starbucks and ask for an Italian soda, you might be greeted with confusion at best and hostility at worst. “We do not sell Italian Sodas. I don’t care what anyone says. I refuse to make an Italian Soda, and I tell every customer that asks for one that we don’t make them,” wrote one Bucks–employed Redditor 11 years ago. “Is there really a good reason we don’t serve it? It’s a specialty Italian-American iced drink that we have all the ingredients for, and we’re a specialty drink restaurant that serves Italian-American style coffee,” remarked another five years ago.
But the thirst for a simple seltzer with syrup hasn’t completely faded. Another Starbucks employee, just three years ago, posted, “Did someone start a rumor that we have these? Over the last week or so I’ve had countless people order one with full confidence then get confused or upset when I told them we don’t have them, and to my knowledge we never have.”
In an era when more and more adults are either cutting down on alcohol consumption or investing in home seltzer makers (or both), we could be due for a customizable soda-on-demand comeback. A few weeks ago at Brooklyn bakery Ciao, Gloria, I was thrilled to see a house-made berry Italian soda on the menu. In the past, owner Renato Poliafito has made flavors like lemon ginger, strawberry basil, triple berry, and raspberry lime, and the bakery just added a blueberry lavender soda for summer. Poliafito tells me that one of his first experiences with Italian styles of soda may have been drinking a seltz limone e sale—a salty lemon drink that’s popular at beach kiosks in Catania, Sicily, where his parents are from. “I would say it’s maybe a proto–Italian soda,” he says. “Ironically enough, my first Italian soda in the American sense was here in the States, and a variation of that is what we offer at Ciao.”