La Roma bakery's special St. Joseph's Day pastries

With its Danish-modern furnishings, espresso bar and faux-greenery Instagram-ready wall, La Roma in Oakdale seems the very model of a modern pastry shop: But one look at the display cases proves that this 3-year-old shop is about as old-school as Italian bakeries come. Because mixing it up with the Dubai-chocolate mashups and red-velvet cakes are confections that co-owner Aniello Zambrano has been making since he was a boy in Salerno, Italy.

La Roma opened here in 2023 but its origins stretch back to 1962, when Zambrano’s working parents decided that the best child care option for their 6-year-old son was the neighborhood bakery. The boy started by cleaning pots and pans, but, by age 15 he had advanced to the baker's bench. In 1975, he emigrated to the U.S. and, five years later, bought Roma in Canarsie, Brooklyn, which expanded first to Massapequa and then, after he sold the original store in 2005, to Holbrook.

Health issues compelled Zambrano to close the business in 2010 but in 2018, he opened a small bakery operation in Bohemia by joining forces with his son, Guerino, to produce goods for the wholesale market. Wholesale-only lasted about as long as it took for the aroma of fresh sfogliatelle to escape into the parking lot. Soon there were lines out the door especially, Guerino recalled, for traditional holiday specialties.

Nowhere is the Italian tradition here stronger than in the two fried pastries that La Roma makes to celebrate la Festa di San Giuseppe (Feast of St. Joseph), March 19, which honors not only Jesus’ father but, in Italy, all fathers. Zeppole di San Giuseppe, which originate in Salerno’s neighboring city of Naples, might be the only celebratory confections on offer here except that Zambrano’s wife, Giuseppa, is from Sicily, the birthplace of sfingi di San Giuseppe.

Both pastries start with pâte à choux, an egg-enriched dough that is also used to make cream puffs, profiteroles and eclairs. For the zeppole, the dough is piped into a ring; for sfingi, it is piped into ... a blob that only gets blobbier while it fries. Both are removed from the oil when they turn golden. When they are cool enough to handle, zeppole are split in half, filled with suave pastry cream and then topped with a little knot of pastry cream and finished with a sweet-sour Amarena cherry. Sfingi are not split, they are simply slathered with ricotta-based cannoli cream and decorated with a maraschino cherry, a length of candied orange peel and some green sprinkles. (The green bits used to be crushed pistachio nuts but ... nut allergies.)

Why, you may ask, are these fried treats associated with St. Joseph? Guerino advanced the theory that on the flight to Egypt, Joseph supported the Holy Family by selling fried dough. Another explanation notes that "zeppa" is Italian for wedge and may allude to Joseph’s profession as a carpenter. What we can be sure of is that fried dough is loved the world over and needs no excuse to grace a celebratory table.

Zeppole and sfingi start appearing at La Roma in January and are sold through Easter. Both are $5.75, minis are $3.85 and the inevitable Dubai-chocolate and rainbow-cookie zeppole are $9. Throughout the year you’ll find S cookies, sesame cookies, filled and dipped cookies, assorted biscotti, cannoli, sfogliatelle and fruit-shaped marzipan, all made the way Aniello learned to make them back in the Old Country.

La Roma Pastry Shop, 4510 Sunrise Hwy., Oakdale, 631-529-6024, laromapastryshop.com