At Philly’s century-old Isgro Pastries, national recognition is so sweet

The 20 bakeries on the James Beard Foundation’s list of semifinalists for 2024′s outstanding bakery are all over the map, literally: Breadshop in Honolulu; Zak the Baker in Miami; ZU Bakery in Portland, Maine; and Nichole’s Fine Pastry & Café in Fargo, N.D., among them. They’re all newcomers when compared with Isgro Pastries in South Philadelphia.

Isgro traces its roots to the early 1900s, when Sicilian immigrant Mario Isgro and his wife, Crocifissa, opened their shop in the front of their rowhouse at 1009 Christian St.

Now in its fourth generation, Isgro has won numerous local awards for its cookies and cannoli. It still works out of one retail store and does mail order via Goldbelly, and wholesales its pastries to only a handful of Philadelphia restaurants and retailer Di Bruno Bros.

“This is years of just continuing to do what we do and maintain the quality and standards that my great-grandfather insisted upon,” said A.J. Sarno, who with his brother, Michael, 46, took over Isgro’s day-to-day operation several years ago from their father, Gus, 75, Mario’s grandson.

Gus is semiretired. Allegedly.

“I have a camera system here that my dad watches constantly,” A.J. said. “He will call me 12 to 15 times a day just to make sure everything is right. He’s a perfectionist.” Lucille Sarno, the boys’ mother and Gus’ wife, retired recently from her job as the bookkeeper.

Isgro made the Beard’s radar through A.J., who sent in a nomination, as owners and chefs may do under the rules. He said he was not sure how the shop made the semifinals, but he noted that he collaborated on a crab Rangoon cannoli with Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon of Kalaya, who won Beard’s 2023 award for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic.

The semifinalists list will be pared to five nominees on April 3. The awards ceremony will be held June 10 in Chicago.

Mario Isgro, born in 1879, grew up in the town of Barcellona, near Messina, Sicily. As a boy, he went to work for a land baron, said Gus Sarno.

He worked in the stables, one of about 300 employees. “My grandfather would go sit on the roof and look down into the kitchen and watch,” Sarno said. “One day, the baroness said to the husband, ‘That kid’s out there every day looking at the kitchen. Why don’t you put him in the kitchen?’ He winds up having a good rapport with the executive chef, and my grandfather came up the ranks. The baron winds up sending him to Vienna for culinary arts. The executive chef was getting older and the baron had the foresight to see what would happen. Long story short, he goes to Vienna for three years and he studied culinary arts, but at a different level. He could do ice sculptures, pull sugar, anything.”

Mario Isgro and his wife, born Crocifissa Buzzetta, arrived in Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century, like thousands of Italian immigrants getting on their feet, thanks to Antonio Palumbo, a South Philadelphia businessman. In 1904, according to family lore, Palumbo helped the couple buy 1009 Christian St., and the bakery joined a block of merchants — then as now. The Isgros later bought the adjoining properties, 1005 and 1007.

Their children Vito, Sam, and Mary were the second generation to work in the bakery. (Son Mario died as a child.) Mary Isgro married Elmo Sarno, a police officer, and had two children, Mario and Gus.

Gus Sarno, born in 1948, bought the store in the 1970s.

If you ask Gus, Michael, and A.J. Sarno how old they were when they started working at Isgro, they will answer, to a man: “If you could put a cherry on a product, you were working.”

The previous generation slept upstairs. The back room was the dining room and kitchen. Young Gus would do his homework on his grandmother’s dining room table.

“The store would never close,” Gus said. “The last person that was up at night, whatever time they went up, they would lock the door.”

Christmas Eve was particularly busy, Gus said. “You’d be at church on Christmas [morning] and all the kids are telling you what they got from Santa Claus. I go home crying to my mom, ‘Why didn’t Santa stop at our house?’ She said, ‘It’s because you’re special. He comes tonight.’”

The Sarno brothers got into the business differently. “When I got old enough to lift stuff, I was at the sink washing dishes,” A.J. said.

Michael, a decade older, said he wasn’t a natural. Take that entry-level job of placing cherries. “They told me to put cherries on all these 20 pans, 48 cookies to a pan,” he said. “I’m like, that’s going to take me forever. [My father’s] motivation would be like, ‘I’ll bet you you can’t do it.’ And then it would be something like, ‘Challenge accepted.’”

One day, Gus and the bakers were making cannoli and called Michael over. Gus showed him how to wrap the warm dough around the stick. “Boom! The first one I did – perfect,” Michael said. “He walked away and he’s like ‘you got the rest.’ I did that, sat there, and ‘pinned’ cannoli for four hours.”

As a young man, Michael worked at the bakery “just to have money,” but then got serious, getting a business degree. When Gus said, “You should probably go to culinary school because I can only teach you what I know,” Michael got a degree from the Restaurant School (now Walnut Hill College). On his days off from school, he’d work at the bakery.

“All of a sudden, I was like a pro, like I had responsibilities,” Michael said. “I went from doing busy work to keeping me out of the way to something I thought was fun.”

He tried working for others for two years, “and then I was like, ‘All right. That’s enough,’” he said.

A.J. said he was “really not a great kid. I was pulling flowers off cakes. I was not doing any work. I did not care. I was the youngest, so they let me get away with it. If I didn’t want to work, I didn’t have to work. I would sit downstairs with Grandmom.”

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Still, the bakery needed help and in time, A.J. did grunt stuff like sweeping and mopping. His father told him: “You don’t have to make this your career.” He got a bachelor’s degree in biology followed by a master’s, with hopes of becoming a doctor.

“After that, I was at home, I was living with Mom and Dad and I was dragging my feet,” he said. “I wasn’t doing anything. I was sitting on the couch watching TV, and my parents were like, ‘What are you going to do? You know, we could use a hand here at the bakery.’”

This time, the bakery work was real: reading recipes, baking, mixing.

He found that he liked it. “I think having a science background helped,” he said. “In baking, there’s no improvising.”

Shortly after, his father asked him what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

“I said, ‘I think I want to work at the bakery,’ and he was happy,” A.J. said.

But not his mother. He said she took his framed master’s degree off the wall and threw it down the basement steps.

In time, A.J. said, his mother understood. He said he gets the satisfaction of working with the people he’s known his whole life. Many employees have been there for decades.

The bakery “was a comfort zone for me,” A.J. said, “but at the same time, I didn’t have an appreciation for that when I was young.”

There is potential for a fifth generation: A.J.’s daughter, Adelina, is 18 months old.

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Isgro’s cases line the main aisle of the shop — a colorful collection of cookies and pastries. We asked for their top five, and they came up with seven:

“Obviously, the cannoli,” A.J. said. “It’s our No.1 seller.”

The cheesecake with the strawberry on it is “probably our second best pastry seller,” A.J. Sarno said.

Pesca con crema, a sponge cake filled with peach cream and drenched in peach liqueur, is an old Sicilian wedding-table creation. “We’re the only ones I know who make that,” Gus Sarno said.

The baba rum is brioche soaked in rum syrup with ricotta in the middle.

Rum cake squares are Isgro’s popular rum cake, scaled down for two people. It has vanilla cream inside and toasted almonds around the outside.

The zeppole, or the Saint Joseph’s cake, is a round fritter filled with vanilla pastry cream or ricotta.

“Cookies are almost as big of a seller as the pastries,” A.J. said. His father created the lemon ricotta and chocolate-chip ricotta cookies about 20 years ago.

In December 2022, Inquirer writer Jenn Ladd described their appeal: “Slicked with a powdered-sugar glaze flavored with vanilla or lemon (and flecked with chocolate chips if the former), a pound of these puppies could easily disappear in minutes.”

“It’s very light and airy,” A.J. Sarno said. “You feel like you can eat a thousand of them.”