Around the turn of the 19th century, Mario Isgro arrived in Philadelphia from Sicily with little to his name—except for his recipes. Classically trained in the pastry and culinary arts, he kept a tight hold on his methods for making traditional Italian desserts: cannoli, sfogliatelle, rum cake, torrone, and Italian cookies. By 1904, Isgro had earned enough money to buy a rowhouse in South Philadelphia, where he and his wife, Crucificia, operated their fledgling bakery out of the basement and first floor and lived upstairs. “They never really closed,” says their great-grandson A.J. Isgro, who now runs Isgro Pastries with his brother, Michael. “Someone would knock on the window [at night] and they’d come into the bakery and fill a couple cannoli.”

The 119-year-old bakery follows regular hours now, but the longtime recipes and techniques remain. A.J. and Michael’s father, the semi-retired Gus Isgro, added items such as brownies and layer cakes to the menu, while creating an Italian-style ricotta cookie for good measure. The family regularly maintains the building’s ornate brickwork and its red, white, and green sign, which is several decades old. Some of the customers’ families have been coming in for decades, too. “People will say things like, ‘For 40 years, we’ve gotten our Isgro rum cake,’” A.J. says. “When you hear stuff like this, you know you’re doing the right thing in the right place.”

New York City baker Alvin Lee Smalls understands the importance of guarding one’s recipes. Nobody outside the inner circle of Lee Lee’s Baked Goods, his 650-square-foot bakery in Harlem, knows the secret to his acclaimed rugelach, which The New Yorker described in 2018 as “transcendent.” The South Carolina–born Smalls worked for nearly 30 years in the kitchen at New York Presbyterian Hospital, rising to become head baker. Though he didn’t grow up eating rugelach, he began experimenting with making the time-honored Jewish pastry during the 1970s, trying different ingredients and strategies until he came up with a recipe that made him happy. He started his own bakery in 1988 and moved to his current location 22 years ago.

In 2021, the National Trust and American Express chose Lee Lee’s as a recipient of a $40,000 Backing Historic Small Restaurants grant. Smalls used most of the funding to produce new signage and upgrade the bakery’s lighting and outdoor seating. Customers enjoy their chocolate, raspberry, and apricot rugelach outside the cheerful storefront—along with slices of Smalls’ carrot cake, another bestseller.

Even when a bakery hasn’t remained in one family or under one owner, it can still serve as an important throughline for a community. The building that now houses The North Bend Bakery in North Bend, Washington, about 30 miles outside Seattle, has continuously held various bakeries since its construction in 1926. The masonry structure’s current owner, Steve Teodosiadis, renovated it about a decade ago, removing a Bavarian-style facade and returning it to its simpler 1920s storefront. “I did research and got pictures from a local museum of what it had looked like,” he says. “We were able to get it all cleaned up and back to where it was before.” A county grant helped fund the project, which involved exposing the old windows and roofline.

Teodosiadis ran the bakery himself for a few years, in part to keep it from becoming any other type of shop. “I didn’t want to see it not be a bakery anymore,” he says. He still owns the building, but in 2018 he sold the business to Seattle baker Aaron Raff, who moved to the area with his young family and renamed the bakery after the town. Raff has doubled down on the ever-popular doughnut, adding varieties like pumpkin, apple spice, and blueberry. He also serves savory items, such as specialty sandwiches, soups, and quiches, and keeps a steady rotation going of pies, cookies, and other sweets. “We try to keep it well-rounded,” he says.

La Segunda Central Bakery in Tampa, Florida (shown at top), also offers both savory and sweet options, including a popular guava turnover. But by far its best-known item is its traditional Cuban-style bread, which it sells to retail customers as well as local restaurants and grocery stores. Owner Copeland More’s great-grandfather Juan Moré traveled from Spain to Cuba in the late 19th century and ended up in Tampa’s Ybor City neighborhood. “[He and others] started a business making Cuban bread, mainly feeding cigar industry workers,” says Copeland. “They had a few bakeries, and the second one survived. That’s why it’s called La Segunda.”

Many of the company’s bakers are veteran La Segunda employees; some have worked there for 30 or even 40 years. They know exactly how to manage each loaf by hand so that it retains the classic Cuban bread characteristics: a slightly sour taste; a “lightly crunchy” crust, according to Copeland; and a traditional palmetto leaf used to score the bread and then baked into the top, a flourish Juan Moré learned in Cuba. “The building is not temperature controlled,” says Copeland, who runs the bread bakery and a couple of bakery-and-cafe branches. “The bakers are making judgments and decisions from minute to minute, to make sure the bread comes out the way it’s supposed to.” In 2022 La Segunda Central Bakery received a Backing Historic Small Restaurants grant, which it used to repaint its 1961 building and replace the windows and doors.