Deep in the heart of Brooklyn, this old-world bakery is a kaleidoscopic Sicilian Willy Wonka candy jungle.
Entering a bakery has always made me feel lazy. The pastry sculptors behind the counter have been up for hours painstakingly arranging layers of laminated dough inside muffin tins, and I’ve been up since 10 watching a TikTok of an especially dirty rug being power-washed. Entering Villabate Alba, the Italian bakery in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn makes me feel obsolete.
There are rows and rows of immaculate cakes, enrobed by buttercream, topped with gleaming glazed strawberries, or pinstriped chocolate tuiles, or dunce hat–shaped peaks of frosting in the exact shade of Nickelodeon slime. There are hundreds of cannoli piped with thick sheep’s milk ricotta imported from Palermo, flooding the bakery with the scent of their freshly fried shells.
Several types of arancini sit beneath sfincione, a spongy pizza slathered with anchovy-fortified tomato sauce and breadcrumbs, which sits to the left of the hand-painted hyperrealistic marzipan fruit, more than 30 types of cookies, and a chocolate confection in an exact replica of a hamburger. A human-sized three-tiered table stands in the center, stacked with cellophane-wrapped rainbows of cookies, each neatly secured at the top with a bow. It is a kaleidoscopic Sicilian Willy Wonka candy jungle, more auspicious than any vacation, so great an escape that it renders the D Train a distant bogeyman. It’s a place that turns my cortisol to pastry cream.
Sample it all, but don’t leave without a box of fried cartocci, spiral torpedoes of yeasted dough filled with sweetened ricotta and rolled in sugar for a crisp carapace.
Villabate Alba, 18th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11204.