As a little girl, Elisha Smiley (BBA01/MAc02) was a bit food obsessed. 

Her favorite books all centered on food—from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier recipe tome “Farmer Boy” to the fanciful peppermint drops and strawberries hauled by “The Little Engine That Could.”

By the time she was a teenager, her mom turned the family's entire Christmas cookie baking over to her. She delighted in shaping dough with antique metal Santa and reindeer cookie cutters, crafting holiday themed green and red M&M cookies, melting gooey milk chocolate over pretzels, and baking her aunt’s favorite snickerdoodles.

The annual baking spree also revealed her talent for numbers. “One of the things I loved about the job was planning it out, getting all the recipes together and then figuring out how many pounds of butter I needed, how much flour and sugar, whether I had the inventory count right, and timing out how long to cook everything,” she recalled.

Little surprise then she majored in accounting at Iowa and excelled well enough to land a coveted spot at PwC in its San Francisco office.

She liked living in the Bay Area and appreciated the privilege of working at a Big Four firm. But a different vision for her future kept intruding. Some might say a “sweeter” one.

While working at PwC, she decided to enroll in a croissant making class at the California Culinary Academy, sparked by her memories of enjoying the flaky staples while studying abroad in Dijon, France.

What followed was a journey down the rabbit hole of pastries, frozen treats, and all things dessert.

In 2006, she decided to take a leap: quit her safe and lucrative accounting job for an uncertain future in food.

“Looking back, maybe I should have worked in a kitchen or something first, but nope,” she laughed.

Today, Smiley is leaning on her accounting skills again to run her own gelato shop in the Napa Valley tourist town of St. Helena, California. Its logo—a purple Vespa scooter named Harold—was inspired by her favorite method of transportation. The store is named Roman Holiday Gelato after her favorite movie, “Roman Holiday,” in which Audrey Hepburn eats gelato on the Spanish Steps in Rome. 

The Italian capital is also where Smiley got her first taste of the frozen treat that now provides her livelihood.

“I went to the same old gelato shop, Giolitti, that Audrey eats at in “Roman Holiday,” but I didn’t know that then,” she said. “I had them put some cherry granita on top of my gelato and that texture of creamy and crunchy and cold was amazing.”

What's Granita?

A traditional Italian frozen dessert made by slowly freezing a mixture of water, sugar, and flavorings—often fresh fruit juice, coffee, or almonds—while scraping it with a fork to create light, crystalline ice flakes.

Her path to gelato shop owner is highlighted by a series of pastry and dessert-making jobs in kitchens across Europe. Upon graduation from culinary school, Smiley worked at the well-regarded Murray Circle restaurant north of San Francisco, where she embraced the challenge of creating seasonal desserts from in-season fruits.

Deciding she needed to learn more, she began applying to restaurants, landing in the Basque Country region of Spain and later, in London.

She says she learned the power of simplicity and importance of taste over flashy design. 

“I sometimes think the appearance of desserts is overrated,” she said. “I like simple but tasty desserts. Things like a shortbread or, in France, financiers, which are a simple but magical combination of brown butter, almond flour, and egg whites.”

Though the pay was low and the work hard, the experiences were priceless and gave her a major leg up when she returned to the U.S.

“You learn so many techniques, with different products and methods,” she said. Back in the U.S., she crafted desserts at Michelin-starred Graham Elliot in Chicago and began her love affair with gelato at Marea, a high-end Italian seafood restaurant in New York City. Two years later, while visiting her sister, Lauren Smiley (BA05), in San Francisco, she saw an ad seeking a pastry chef at the high-end restaurant Delfina. She applied and got the job.

Before that job ended due to COVID-19, it sent her to Bologna, Italy, to take classes on gelato making inside the Carpigiani factory, the largest purveyor of gelato machines in the world. Upon her return, she got a job teaching at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) at its St. Helena campus, but was itching to become her own boss. 

Serendipity struck when the longtime ice cream shop one block off the main drag in St. Helena went up for sale.

“Multiple people sent me the article about its closure in the St. Helena Star newspaper,” she said. “I signed the lease and had my dad come out. We repainted the place purple, put in new countertops and ceiling tiles, and got ready to open.”

Gelato and ice cream, what's the difference?

Gelato uses more milk and less cream, resulting in lower fat content, and is churned more slowly, which incorporates less air and creates a denser texture. It’s also served at a slightly warmer temperature, making it softer and allowing intense flavors to come through. Ice cream, by contrast, is richer, fluffier, and colder, with a creamier mouthfeel but less concentrated flavor.

Entering its third year in business, Roman Holiday Gelato now has eight part-time employees, including a couple of CIA students and area high schoolers. From time to time, the institute still calls Smiley in to teach its culinary math class, keeping her accounting chops strong. 

“Owning a business is as hard as I thought it would be,” she said. “But I’m my own boss and I’m doing what I love.”

Photos by Nicola Parisi.

This article appeared in the 2025 issue of Iowa Ledger.