Lucibello’s at 97: The Grand Avenue Pastry Shop Where the Recipes Haven’t Changed Since 1929

At the corner of Grand Avenue and Olive Street, a one-story brick building with a red-and-white sign has been selling cannoli, sfogliatelle and Italian cookies to New Haven for more than six decades. The pastry shop inside it is older still.

Lucibello’s Italian Pastry Shop was founded on Sept. 14, 1929, according to the shop’s history. Last month it marked 97 years. It is still owned by the Faggio family, and owner Peter Faggio says much of what you can buy there today was on the shelves on day one.

“Everything — for the most part — that was offered in 1929 is still offered today,” Faggio told the New Haven Register in 2021. “I can honestly say all of our cookies are the same recipes and the same cookies, same with all of the pastries. We’ve never had to introduce any ‘American’ dessert.”

From dishwasher to owner

The shop was started by Frank Lucibello on Chapel Street. Peter Faggio’s father, also named Frank, began working for Lucibello there at age 10, Peter Faggio told the Register. Frank Faggio bought the business in 1959, according to the shop’s website, after learning the craft at the original Chapel Street location.

When urban renewal reshaped Wooster Square and Chapel Street, the bakery moved to its present home on Grand Avenue. “Both shops were considered important enough 60 years ago that they were given a chance to move to new quarters when the strong arm of redevelopment came through Wooster and Chapel Streets,” New Haven historian and food-tour owner Colin M. Caplan told the Register, referring to Lucibello’s and Libby’s.

The son who never expected to be a baker

Peter Faggio did not plan to run a bakery. He was 24, just out of Quinnipiac University with a finance degree and plans to head to Wall Street, when his father was suddenly diagnosed with cancer and died, the Yale Daily News reported in a 2012 profile. His brother wanted to be a police officer. His mother took over the books, and Peter took over the shop.

Only his father had made the sfogliatelle. The secret recipe is kept on old index cards, the Daily News reported, and Peter had two weeks to learn it. He became the shop’s sfogliatella maker, and they became his favorite pastry, even though cannoli are the best seller.

“I never expected to end up here,” he told the Daily News.

The paper described a kitchen where some things never left: a refrigerator dating to 1940, a slab of marble from the original store once used to cool fresh cream, a single oven and no dishwasher. Baker John Ripkin had been there 32 years at the time and remembered Peter as a little kid running around the kitchen.

The days follow a rhythm, the Daily News reported: Mondays are cookies and cannoli, Thursdays are sfogliatelle and Fridays are cakes. Weekends are for weddings. At Christmas, Easter and St. Joseph’s Day, the line stretches out the door and down the street.

Cannoli shells are still made in-house in the early morning. When Daily News food writers visited in 2020, Faggio was working the dough at 6 a.m. so the cannoli would be in the case by the 9 a.m. opening, they wrote.

What to order

The pastry case changes a little day to day. These are long-standing items on the shop’s menu, with photos from the shop.

Sicilian cannoli

The best seller, according to the Daily News. Shells filled with ricotta and chocolate chips. Mini versions come in the shop’s seven-piece miniature pastry assortment.

Sfogliatelle

The house specialty: layered, shell-shaped pastries wrapped around a ricotta filling, made by hand from the family’s secret recipe. Faggio’s advice, as he gave it to the Daily News: “If you have them warm, it’s completely different.”

Lobster tails

Listed on the menu with a choice of vanilla, chocolate or ricotta filling.

Ricotta pasticciotti

Pasticciotti, which the menu also calls bocconotti, come with ricotta, vanilla or chocolate filling.

Frosted éclairs

Frosted, or split and filled with vanilla or chocolate cream.

Italian cookies

Sold loose or on trays from 30 to 200 cookies: rainbow cookies, pignoli, anginetti lemon drops, almond paste cookies, fig cuccidati, jam sandwich cookies and more.

Italian ice, in season

Four flavors: lemon, raspberry, chocolate and vanilla. In 2005, the Daily News reported that Lucibello’s served Italian ice only in summer. “We have customers who wait for it,” Faggio said then. “A lot of them stock up on it for the winter.”

For a celebration, the shop’s Italian rum cake still follows the original recipe from the shop’s beginnings, Faggio told the Register. Cakes come in Italian cream, Napoleon, ricotta cassata and other styles, and the shop makes wedding cakes and seasonal wheat and ricotta pies.

What locals say

Lucibello’s regulars measure their loyalty in decades. Anita Sabia Diglio, a member of the Wooster Square Cooks Facebook group, told the Register in 2021 that her family had bought from Lucibello’s since before her wedding in 1965, when she got her Italian cream wedding cake there. “Over the years, all our special occasions have been from them,” she said.

Another member, Irene Perrotta DiCaprio, said her rum wedding cake came from Lucibello’s and her husband’s family history with the shop went back to when her father-in-law was a boy. “Their sfogliatelle taste exactly like the ones we enjoyed at our favorite pastry shop in Sorrento,” she told the Register.

Caplan put Lucibello’s in the city’s top tier. “Libby’s and Lucibello’s are the Pepe’s and Sally’s of pastries in New Haven,” he told the Register, “tried and true, serving loyal customers for 100 years and pastries so well crafted.”

Faggio sees the same families come back again and again. “It brings [customers] back to their childhood, and then they bring their children,” he told the Register. “And then people come back and have their wedding cake and come back for 50th anniversary cake or their children’s wedding cakes.”

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