When Corrado Palmieri opened his eponymous café in the Dallas Farmers Market in 2016, we could boast of having a proper Italian coffee shop and bakery that Dallas hadn’t had before. His was a place to linger over a cup of coffee and a pastry, where early on a cadre of Italian regulars set up residence on weekend mornings.

The coffee shop—a counter, really—serves a simple line-up of pastries, but they’re not the kind you’ll find sharing room with a muffin or almond croissant. In fact, they underscore Italians’ love of all things filled with cream. Palmieri, who is from the small town of Galatina, in the Puglian region of southern Italy, spent a year apprenticing with a baker in his hometown to learn to make the beautiful custard-filled domes called pasticciotto.