The cookie racks at Gino’s Pastry Shop. Photo: Aaron McDonell Moline.

“Does anyone know where Gino’s Pastry Shop is?” Anywhere else in the world, it’s an honest query. But on Saturday nights at Pasquale’s Rigoletto in the Bronx, amid boisterous music and an atmosphere of chaotic celebration, everyone is in stitches. No one laughs harder than Jerome Gino Raguso, the baker and owner of Gino’s Pastry Shop since 1990.

The joke is that everyone in Little Italy knows where Gino’s is. Situated on 187th Street just west of Arthur avenue, it forms the bakery bookends of the neighborhood along with Artuso Pastry Shop to the east, and has since Raguso’s father opened it in 1960.

Jerome Raguso was born three years earlier, the year his parents married and moved to America. “Conceived in Italy, born in Queens,” he said with pride, sitting at one of his shop’s five tables on a Tuesday afternoon. The Ragusos made a home for themselves and their six children in the apartment above the pastry shop; Jerome still lives there now. “The bakery bunch, they called us.” But despite the teasing his siblings endured, Gino’s established itself as the place to purchase authentic Italian baked goods, especially their cannoli.

“I still make all my father’s recipes,” Raguso said, looking over his glass displays, where rows of cookies colored pink and brown and green and bright white wait to be scooped and bagged and purchased by the pound. To the right, a display cooler with cakes and cannoli shells hums steadily. Gino’s cannoli are made to order, and he fills them with hypnotic alacrity.
Many of the traditional Italian items at Gino’s are only available in his shop, and people come from all over to try them. “One guy from Boston comes just for this,” he said, laying a thin cookie with a white bump atop it on the table. It is one of his Ossi dei Morti, or Bones of the Dead, and though it’s traditional to eat them on November 1st, the Italian Day of the Dead, Gino’s stocks them year-round.

About a month later, on a Saturday night in late March, Raguso retrieves two of those same cookies from their place beside the marzipan lambs on display for Easter and puts them in a bag. Although the store officially closes at 7 p.m., it’s past 8 and Gino’s doors are still open. It’s dark already, and families walking home or to their cars after dinner traipse by, eyeing Gino’s displays. Giovanna Petti, Raguso’s girlfriend and the cashier at Gino’s for the past five years, beckons them in. He calls her Joanne. She calls him Gino.

Between customers, Petti moves deliberately, closing the shop one section at a time. At 9, she takes a break to play HQ, a live trivia game she plays for cash on her phone. She loses on question 6 of 12, missing out on $7. Twenty minutes later, the final customers of the night arrive, a family of five, carrying doggy bags, that spotted the marzipan lambs from the sidewalk. They are welcomed graciously by Raguso, who smiles without a hint of the exhausting day behind him.

It’s after 10 p.m. when they shut the lights and Petti runs out to get her car. Raguso locks the shop and, still in his white baker’s attire and checkered pants, gets into the blue Accord—to drive the 1,000 feet to the parking valet at Pasquale’s Rigoletto.

Rigoletto doesn’t seem like a place that’s ever quiet. In the main dining room, Riggie and Maggie are singing “Under the Boardwalk” not quite in unison, while stories are loudly told and punctuated with laughter. Sometimes Raguso sings too, but not tonight. When the regulars spot him, at first it’s a lot of “Hey!” from the far sides of tables, then familiar faces approach and it becomes a softer, knowing “How you doin’?” But Raguso is tired and hungry and wants to keep the pleasantries for after the meal.

As the first carafe of red wine arrives, he orders individual crab-stuffed avocados to start, with lime juice and cilantro. The waiters also bring plates of long stuffed green hot peppers and asparagus with melted parmesan.

Petti orders the pork cutlet with broccoli rabe; Raguso orders the gnocchi, served with broccoli, garlic and oil, which he inhales, tilting the plate afterward. “I didn’t like it,” he said, with a smile.

Above the threshold between the two dining rooms hangs a sign that reads: Sempre Noi. Always us. Raguso takes this maxim seriously and maintains traditions that go well beyond the cookies he serves. When someone moves into the neighborhood, he sends over a box of fresh pastries. When he spots a fire nearby from his perch above the shop, he raids the coolers and cookie racks and comes if not to the rescue then to offer some cannoli and condolences. Next month, he will be honored as the Bronx Made Man of the Year. “I never thought anybody knew,” he said.

But like the address of his pastry shop, everyone knows it. The respect and kindness he’s engendered for the past 30 years means there’s always a warm reception for him at Pasquale’s Rigoletto, and after a long day at work he drinks and jokes and basks in the glow of goodwill. When the meal ends with no bill, he pays with a round of pleasantries and assurances that he will return soon for a repeat evening. His loyalty to the restaurant is old, and reciprocal. When his father died in 1990, Pasquale’s Rigoletto held a memorial, and closed its large parking lot to the public so that the family could pay their respects. “Rigoletto is my safety blanket,” Raguso said, taking a deep drink of wine. “It’s my home away from home.”

Aaron Moline