State Rep. Peter G. Palumbo, above left, of Cranston, works the grill beside employee Andrew Calista, of Charlestown, at his Misquamicut State Beach cafe and sundry shop, below. The cafe is known for its Baby Elliott’s Frozen Lemonade and Baby Christopher’s Soft-Serve Ice Cream.

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

WESTERLY — It’s about 3 p.m. on a hot summer day, and Peter G. Palumbo, a deputy majority leader of the state House of Representatives, is greasing doughboys.

Sweat beads on his forehead as he briskly rubs pieces of dough on a tray of frying oil in the Misquamicut State Beach cafÉ.

“Just in case we run out,” he says. “You can never have enough.”

Though the Cranston Democrat is better known for making laws on Smith Hill, he has a non-legislative summer job here in Westerly, as the sole contractor of the beach’s cafe and sundry shop.

For the past six summers, Palumbo has traded in his suit and tie for a T-shirt and shorts, a hall of squabbling representatives working the room for a kitchen of bubbly teenagers working the grills.

Every day from Memorial Day to Labor Day — weekends included — Palumbo arrives at the beach around 10 a.m. to open up the cafÉ. Then, for about the next eight hours, he runs around, doing everything from teaching employees how to make coffee, making condiment runs to local stores and yelling at his teenage employees, many of whom are children of his constituents.

“Josh! Josh! Garbage is full!” he shouts at one of his managers, after eying a bin in the backroom.

“As much as I feel like killing them sometimes,” he later says, “I enjoy working with them. It keeps me young.” Palumbo, 46, adds that running around with them keeps him fit; he’s lost 25 pounds since the summer began. (His employees say they love their hyperactive boss, who says he had attention-deficit disorder. “He keeps things fun,” says Katie Trainor, who works in the sundry job.)

Palumbo’s days are especially long in June, when the General Assembly is at full tilt trying crank out a budget. In that month, Palumbo says he works at the cafe until 3 p.m., drives home to take a shower, and then throws on a suit and heads for the State House. He gets home in the wee hours of the morning to get a few hours of sleep. Then, after dropping his kids off at educational programs, it’s back to the beach.

But as exhausting as it is (“I’ve been doing rosaries every day!” he says to a friend on the phone), Palumbo, who formerly worked for GTECH, loves his job. Running his own business is his dream and, working at the beach, he says as he glances at the swimsuit-clad crowd before him, has its “benefits.” But his favorite part of the job is selling a product his family invented eight years ago, a summer treat named after his eldest son: Baby Elliott’s Frozen Lemonade.

The lemonade is similar to Del’s (“But a little bit tastier!” Palumbo says), a slushy drink with bits of real lemon in it. It’s slightly tangier, but it might pass for its more famous counterpart if served in an unlabeled cup.

Palumbo says his father-in-law and aunt perfected the recipe, but he came up with the name:

“We were sipping some scotch in my father-in-law’s house and were brainstorming names for the lemonade. And not thinking clearly because I had several scotches, I saw my mother-in-law carrying my son up the stairs. My son, Elliott, was in a little yellow onesie, and he reminded me of a lemon.

“So I said, ‘That’s it! Baby Elliott’s Frozen Lemonade!’ ”

His relatives loved the idea, and Elliott, now 7, became the face of the product, his mug shot used as its logo. (Palumbo named the soft-serve ice cream he sells at the beach “Baby Christopher’s Soft-Serve Ice Cream,” because he didn’t want his other son to be left out.)

Palumbo also sells the lemonade at the Scarborough State Beach cafÉ, which his relatives run, and at his new, year-round ice cream shop, Scoop du Jour, on Park Avenue in Cranston. Though he has lofty ambitions of turning Baby Elliott’s into a nationwide brand, his first goal is to have his lemonade overtake Del’s in the state. It’s a desire that led this year to an uncomfortable encounter in the State House with Rep. Bruce J. Long, a Jamestown Republican who owns a Del’s franchise.

“I took [Baby Elliott’s] to the budget session,” Palumbo says with a laugh, “but I brought it the same night Bruce brought his Del’s. So having more Democrats in the House, they were a little one-sided. But Bruce took it very seriously and got so upset.”

The two worked out a deal and alternated nights on which they brought their lemonade. Though Long’s rival in politics and now business, Palumbo is quick to point out that the Republican actually helped him figure out how to properly store Baby Elliott’s when Palumbo and his family were first experimenting with their lemonade.

As Palumbo stands in front of his cafÉ, looking at queue of people waiting to buy the lemonade and ice cream, he beams.

“I love it,” Palumbo says, looking at the faces of his sons that are plastered all over the cafÉ’s walls. “I don’t get to see my kids very much during the summer, so this is nice.”

swoo@projo.com