After cancer and loss, chef Janine Bruno found her purpose in pasta and gelato

The curious neighbor popped his head into the open front door of Homemade by Bruno one recent day, as Janine Bruno rolled out pasta on the counter in her soon-to-open atelier — a tiny, charming, brick-walled storefront in the Point Breeze neighborhood.

It’s not a cafe, she told him, proffering a scoop of Italian rainbow cookie gelato and a metal spoon across the counter. “And it’s not a scoop shop.” He ate and nodded as she returned to shaping orecchiette.

There won’t be lines of customers snaking around 15th and Wharton, either, she said. Homemade by Bruno will be used most of the time for gelato production and for cooking demonstrations and private pasta-making classes. (There will be occasional gelato sales to the public, but their hours will be advertised on her Instagram.)

The shop, which opened March 25, represents Bruno’s reconnection to her Italian heritage after a series of misfortunes, including a cancer diagnosis six years ago at age 30, a sudden breakup, her grandmother’s death, a layoff, and of course the pandemic.

Bruno grew up first in California and then in Burlington County, N.J., as the Sicilian American family from Brooklyn followed her father’s car business. Sunday dinner was the big thing, Bruno said. “Every Sunday from the morning I woke up, I smelled meatballs frying. It was just all about family and food.”

But she dispenses any notions of growing up learning to cook at her nonna’s apron strings. “We were all kind of at her feet stuffing meatballs, and my great-grandmother was even around, but my sister was the most into it. I don’t have strong memories of it.”

Bruno, who had been in marketing, moved to Philadelphia in 2012 to join a guy she was dating, and took a job in property management. He got sick. “That was a total game-changer,” she said. “But we stayed together.”

Fast-forward a little over three years, and Bruno was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 30. “It was the biggest shock of my life,” she said. “We had gone through that with him, and now I was sick.”

In spring 2016, five weeks after she had a double mastectomy, “my boyfriend came home and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” she said. They broke up. She moved across town, in pain emotionally and physically.

That summer, she joined her family on their annual summer trip to Sicily. “I had this really strong connection more than ever to my surroundings, my family, and the food,” she said. “Of course, I’ve always been around food and wine, but it was just like something that was really comforting.”

Shortly after she returned — early, because she had developed an infection — her grandmother died. “I was hanging on by a thread as it was, and this happened,” she said. She returned to work from sick leave that December, but in early January 2017, she was let go.

“It was truly one thing after another,” she said. “I felt like everything that was comfortable was stripped from me, and I was pushed out of my comfort zone to the extremes. I felt like I had no purpose. I didn’t work, had no money, didn’t know where to even start or how to go about applying for a job. I felt rejected on every level. And my body was different.”

She said she found comfort in going to Sunday Mass at St. Philip Neri in Queen Village, followed by a walk to the Italian Market, where she bought ingredients, went home, popped on Sinatra, and cooked.

She was cooking for herself. “I was feeling like I was creating this beautiful thing from scratch, and I wanted to have the confidence to share it, but I didn’t want to socialize, which is not like me.” As she began posting photos on social media, and making antipasto boards before they were cool, she broke out of her rut. “I started to find a connection to something, a purpose, really,” she said.

At the start of 2018, she took another marketing job that allowed her to work from home and pay the bills. She gave herself two years to figure out her next step.

Her cousin Alberto visited from Sicily, and when they cooked pasta, “he was like, ‘This is your thing.’ And he was right. I needed to share that with people, because it was more than just like, ‘We’re going to get flour and an egg and roll it through a machine.’ It’s an art. It’s therapeutic. It’s what calmed me and gave me purpose.”

That would be her purpose.

She built a social media audience and started cooking classes in their homes under the name Homemade by Bruno.

With the two years winding down, she quit the marketing job.

On Dec. 31, 2019, she flew to Italy. “I spent about a month there, just stepping way out of my comfort zone,” she said. “No agenda. Just making my way through on a low budget, cooking. I wanted to develop authentic culinary experiences for people to come to Italy, because as I was doing these pasta classes, they would say, ‘I want to go to Italy with you. We want to do stuff just like this.’”

She was in Italy as COVID-19 began spreading through Europe, and returned to South Philadelphia. In those early pandemic days, she couldn’t book trips but would assemble boxes of ingredients, ship them to people’s homes, and host virtual classes.

Eagles executive vice president Howie Roseman and his wife, Mindy, found her on Instagram and asked her to cook Mother’s Day dinner in 2020, which led to catering jobs for coaches and their families.

But dropping off food didn’t satisfy her need to be engaging. “Long story short, the end of 2020, I was in that same place,” she said. “I felt like I had lost my purpose again.”

A Sicilian friend approached her in early 2021 about the Gelato Festival America in Los Angeles, for which Giada De Laurentiis was president of the jury. “I have never made gelato before,” she said she told him.

Still, she sent along her story and her family’s recipe for rainbow cookies and was accepted into the competition. Around the same time, she had been volunteering at a String Theory Charter School in Spring Garden, which has a gelato machine. She practiced daily for months on it, and won the first-round popular vote at the festival and finished in the top six.

“The life was put back into me,” she said. Bruno plunged into gelato, approaching Mat Falco to sell it at Herman’s Coffee, and making flavors for restaurants.

Bruno made a chili gelato pop and a tamarind chili sorbetto for Kalaya, the Thai restaurant in South Philadelphia (initially with a charitable cut going to AnaOno, a company that produces mastectomy bras). She makes baklava gelato for a Greek restaurant in central New Jersey, and pig’s blood gelato for Ember & Ash in South Philadelphia.

“It’s not just about preserving traditional Italian recipes,” Bruno said. “It’s bringing out flavors in other cultures. I’m working with other brands and restaurants and finding out what they’re passionate about.”

Eventually, Bruno added in-home cooking classes. “My friend said, ‘You just walk into someone’s kitchen and take over?’ But it fits my personality. I want to make you feel comfortable, and in turn, I feel comfortable,” she said. “Once I started going into other people’s homes and seeing the better workspaces, opposed to working on a table in my dining room, it got into the back of my mind that maybe one day I’ll have a place people can come and make pasta.”

At her new space, Bruno will host pasta-making classes (capped at 12 people), suitable for team-building events and parties.

There are no pasta machines. Most of her shaped pastas are simply semolina rimacinata flour and water, which people get to roll, cut, and cook or take home. “People think that they come to class, ‘Where’s the egg? Where’s the machine? Where’s the roller?’ And I say, ‘No, we’re going to do it old world. This is what nonna did. We’re going to do it all by hand.”

She also plans to host classes for making mozzarella and meatballs.

“If you talked to me a couple of years ago, I wouldn’t believe this would be happening,” she said. “It can get a little overwhelming. But it’s also incredibly rewarding, like when I sit back and think about all of what I’ve accomplished from a very dark place where I was completely hopeless. But that’s where I also feel incredibly lucky, because I did have a favorable prognosis and I got through it. Hopefully, I’ll never have to deal with it again.”