When they opened Carrara Pastries in a Moorpark strip mall in 2012, brothers Damiano Carrara and Massimiliano Carrara routinely greeted patrons while wearing floppy white chef's hats.

On anyone else, the matching chapeaux would have looked downright dorky. On them, the hats signaled an old-school seriousness that has since played out as a classic coming-to-America success story. Over the past five years, the natives of Lucca, Italy, have opened a second pastry shop (in Agoura Hills), published a cookbook of family-favorite recipes and expanded their original Moorpark site in terms of size — by pushing into an adjoining suite — and menu, which now also offers sandwiches, salads, pastas, wine and house-made gelato.