Spending time in the prolific kitchens of Bruno's NYC Bakery in Dongan Hills means learning from the master himself, master pastry chef Biagio Settepani, as he walks an observer through the process of building Italian desserts. Take the cassata cake, a complex specialty of the Bruno house. The dessert, the pastry patriarch and his colleague/son Joe will tell you, is the oldest he knows of Italian food culture, quite possibly in the world.

"This is our version of the cassata. Different cities have different ways of doing it. Some places do it with just sponge around," Biagio said. Some of the cake versions, like those at Bruno's, feature it with green-hued blocks of marzipan alternated with equally sized patches of sponge cake.