This Castro Baker Just Threw the Panettone Gauntlet Down
Giovanni Liguoro moved from Southern Italy to bake at a brand new Castro District bakery a few summers ago. He opened Poesia Café as head baker in August 2022 alongside Francesco D’Ippolito. D’Ippolito, who owns the longtime neighborhood Italian restaurant favorite Poesia, literally upstairs from the new bakery, saw great things in Liguoro. Now, Liguoro is ready to take those ambitions to new heights: He says he’s got the best panettone in San Francisco. “I am the panettone in San Francisco,” Liguoro says with a laugh.
The bakery’s three styles of panettone are now on sale through December 20. They’re available in-house or for pick up at Oakland’s thanks to the business’s chef collab program. The Italian treats are available through Maison Verbena in the Ferry Building, too. He took to Instagram to let fans know about this year’s offerings, claiming “the only panettone made in San Francisco is at Poesia Cafe.” Liguoro began offering these panettone in 2023, but this year he’s ratcheting things up.
He brought in a suite of classic Italian ingredients for 2024. Moreover, he’s been studying what he calls a renewed interest thanks to super popular online cakes. “There are super famous Instagram panettone. They are breaking the tradition a little bit,” Liguoro says. “My focus was on discovering how they work, and how I could bring that to my production.”
This year he’s got three varieties. He’s got one with coffee inside the dough, giving it a dark brown shine. It’s further mixed with French chocolate drops — like a Hershey’s Kiss — of both dark and milk chocolate. There’s also the “classico,” studded with candy orange and raisins soaked in hot water and liqueur for 24 hours. (He notes a lot of people have come to hate panettone for those infamous hard raisins; Not so in his.) He also incorporates a candy orange paste from a factory in Sicily to accompany that sugary citrus. The third is a pistachio panettone with roasted and salted pistachios joined by a piping bag of pistachio paste. All three rely on a vanilla paste that he brings in from Tahiti and a lemon zest. “Mixing orange, vanilla, and lemon, you don’t really notice the three different flavors,” Liguoro says. “It’s more like a tastiness in everything.”
He should know. In Naples, his father has been a baker for 25 years. That includes a lot of panettone baking. He took that training and attended CAST Alimenti in Brescia in 2016. Panettone comes from a mother dough, or what Liguoro and fellow devotees of the traditional recipe call the “pasta madre.” This serves as the bread’s yeast. At each temperature along the panettone’s development, new bacteria develops, conjuring out deeper flavors. Liguoro treats it “like a kid,” giving proper water and temperature to bring out what he calls the ideal Italian product. “It’s very chemical stuff,” he says.
That technical approach is why he considers his panettone the only real game in town. There are others in the city, sure. Ultra-classic Liguria Bakery in North Beach and beloved co-op Arizmendi Bakery in the Mission and in the Inner Sunset come to mind. But he says nobody is making the seasonal favorite in San Francisco in that classic way. From Roy in Oakland is one that he does likes; He respects that chef Roy Shvartzapel has honed his craft day after day for years. Emporio Rulli in Marin County was his last boss in the U.S. before opening Poesia, and he says that’s where he saw real panettone in the North Bay. When it comes to the city proper, though, he is throwing the gauntlet down. “I’m 27,” Liguoro says. “I’ve seen a lot of panetonne.”
Poesia Café will sell panetonne on the business’s website and by coming into the shop or at Mr. Espresso through December 20.
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