By David Landis, The Gay Gourmet –
“When you’re alone, and life is making you lonely, you can always go—downtown.”
—Petula Clark
Those lyrics were humming through my head as I prepared to interview Giovanni Liguoro, the talented pastry chef at Poesia Café in the Castro. Why? His successful 18th Street pastry, sandwich, and salad café will be expanding to 1 Post Street, where he’ll be opening a second location, hopefully in late November. The new enterprise is complete with a huge chef’s kitchen, a retail operation, space for cooking classes, and outdoor plaza seating. The avuncular, charming, and handsome chef will be presiding over the entire operation. So, The Gay Gourmet recently sat with him virtually to preview the new space and talk about downtown as the next location for expansion.
David Landis: Buon Giorno! Are you in the new kitchen?
Giovanni Liguoro: Yes, I’m at the new location at 1 Post Street.
David Landis: Wow. So, are the new location and kitchen together? And you’re in that big plaza where Post meets Montgomery and Market, with outdoor seating?
Giovanni Liguoro: Yes, they are together. I’m standing now right on the plaza with outdoor seating.
David Landis: Fantastic! What’s your projected opening date?
Giovanni Liguoro: We’re supposed to open at the end of November.
David Landis: Tell me about your background, Giovanni.
Giovanni Liguoro: I’m a second-generation pastry chef because my family has a pastry shop in Italy. I started mixing dough when I was a kid. After graduation from high school, I went to Milan to work as a teacher’s assistant. But I’m from Naples originally.
David Landis: How long have you been with Poesia, and how has your role expanded?
Giovanni Liguoro: I’ve been with Poesia here in the United States for 3 years. We started from the Castro location, then moved to a bigger facility in the Twitter building. Now we moved to this kitchen. It’s a great addition to have the kitchen close to the street where everyone walking by can totally smell us baking all day long.
David Landis: Do you think downtown San Francisco is coming back?
Giovanni Liguoro: Yes, I see with my eyes every day that downtown is totally coming back. Yesterday was the first Thursday of the month when there’s always a party, and the city was crowded. Plus, there are conventions and events coming back, especially next year. I see the city is much cleaner than years before, and I know it’s going to keep growing.
David Landis: Tell me about your philosophy behind baking.
Giovanni Liguoro: Every time someone eats my pastries, I’m very honored because every single person trusts you with what you did with your hands. That’s why I really care to use healthy ingredients like Italian flour, organic eggs. I try to use only natural colors, not artificial colors. We don’t have any preservatives in our production, and everything we sell is something we make with our hands. We make simple things in-house—the mayonnaise, and, for drinks, we make our own chai, our own matcha, our own pumpkin spice latte. We have a recipe for everything. We try not to buy anything. Also, since five months ago, we selected and are roasting our own espresso beans. We have our own blend with Mr. Espresso in Oakland that helped us with this process. It was a lot of tasting coffee every day, like 20 coffees every tasting. But I think it’s worth it; we have our own recipe, and we’re planning to make it so people can grind their coffee at home.
David Landis: Is it medium, light, or dark roast?
Giovanni Liguoro: Medium dark roast. This comes from our espresso tradition in the south of Italy, where we roast a lot of beans.
David Landis: What is a typical day like?
Giovanni Liguoro: Normally I start around 5 am. We come here (to the kitchen) for baking for our café in the Castro, plus other customers like the Ferry Building and the de Young Museum, to provide pastries to them. Once we finish all the baking, we have breakfast all together as a team-building activity. Then we start production. We have different natural fermentations that we start early in the morning, and we go through the process until noon, 1 pm. Then we close the kitchen, and I stay another couple hours to do my quality control. I spend a couple hours by myself in the bakery. Normally I get my lunch around 3 pm at Poesia in the Castro. I really like to have lunch with random customers—I sit with them. It’s part of my daily routine, hanging out with someone. That’s why Poesia makes me feel very comfortable. After lunch, I take care of office stuff, meeting with (the owner) Francesco. We meet every day. By 5 pm, I’m done with my day.
David Landis: Yeah, except I see you in the restaurant sometimes at night.
Giovanni Liguoro: Yeah, (laughing) that’s hanging out!
David Landis: Are all the pastries made fresh daily?
Giovanni Liguoro: Yes, they are fresh daily, 7 days a week.
David Landis: Wow. And how big is your team?
Giovanni Liguoro: Right now, we are 6 people.
David Landis: What’s the secret to a proper cornetto?
Giovanni Liguoro: The secret is caring for the mother dough, the sourdough that we use for the panettone. That’s one of the differences that makes the cornetto different from a croissant. We have this sourdough, this baby that needs to be fed every 3 hours. Even if I’m not working with the sourdough that day, this baby needs to be fed like 6 am, 9 am, 12 pm.
David Landis: How old is the sourdough?
Giovanni Liguoro: I think it’s from my dad and it started more than 20 years ago. But, to be honest, it’s a legend, because every day you feed a sourdough, the bacteria are new. So more than how old it is, I can say my sourdough will be someone else’s sourdough with the change of the environment, the temperature, the smell. It’s totally different in each place that it goes. Normally I also bring a piece of dough from Italy every time I visit my dad in his bakery. We know that his sourdough is different than mine, but, after one week, you can totally see the difference.
David Landis: How is Lievito Madre different from what people in San Francisco might think of as sourdough?
Giovanni Liguoro: The Lievito Madre works with different pH, different acidity. The consistency is very different. Lievito Madre is harder. When you cut it and smell the acidity, the acidity is sweeter, milder than a normal sourdough. In sourdough you can totally taste that something is sour, a little acid. In cornetto, it’s not. Plus, we use it in the cornetto because it’s a natural preservative when the croissant goes in the freezer. Freezing the cornetto is the last process of production.
David Landis: Oh, they’re frozen?
Giovanni Liguoro: Yeah, they need to be frozen because we want to keep the acidity on the same level. We freeze it for 12 hours just to stop the fermentation.
David Landis: My favorite menu item at Poesia Café is your mortadella sandwich on focaccia. I just love it. The pastries are a close second. Do you have a favorite?
Giovanni Liguoro: The mortadella is my favorite. Since I moved here, I’ve never tasted a different mortadella slice better than the one I have. Every time they’re like, oh, we are running out, I’m like, give me all the mortadella because I don’t want any other brand. This mortadella, together with the pistachio pesto, the olive oil, and sun-dried tomatoes, makes it very special. For your information, it’s the most popular item.
David Landis: So, I’m in the majority! Are you offering panettone during the holiday season again, and do customers need to pre-order it?
Giovanni Liguoro: Yeah, we started the pre-order for Thanksgiving and will continue offering it through the Christmas holidays. This year, the news is that we can also ship the panettone throughout the United States.
David Landis: It used to be that locally made panettone was really hard to find. I think there was one guy named Roy in California who made it. Now you can get it at Eataly in San Jose, and now you have it.
Giovanni Liguoro: I think that, in general, panettone in the world is becoming very popular, and there are other good bakers. I would say that Roy is one of the best panettone makers we have in the world. I’ve ordered from him in the past. Also, I just want to add that, last week we started a collaboration with Williams Sonoma, Williams Sonoma by Giovanni Liguoro, in which we developed a recipe to ship our croissants ready-to-eat throughout the United States. Basically, people are buying the croissants, and within two days they have the croissants in their house.
David Landis: And are those shipped frozen, or how do you make sure they’re fresh?
Giovanni Liguoro: No, they’re fresh—we make them and ship quickly. The Lievito Madre, as I said, is a natural preservative and keeps the cornetto very moist. I wasn’t believing it, but we made so many tests, we shipped back and forth from New York. It works!
David Landis: Anything else you’d like to say?
Giovanni Liguoro: What I feel about this new Poesia Café is that it’s in the center of the city, and we are going to make it our main flagship store. We are going to have a huge showcase for pastries that is going to be very beautiful—a big expanse. We will have some Italians coming to help here with the panettone. That’s why we hope to open in November, because panettone season is magic. We make them all day long; it’s a whole atmosphere, like living in a bubble. I’m just excited that this is going to happen in this new location. I also like the idea of the plaza because I find it cozier than the parklets on the street, and safer. That’s why I’m totally amazed. This is going to be a café in a plaza, just like in Italy. It’s also crowded because of the BART station. I’m very excited about it.
David Landis: I wish you all the best.
Poesia Café: https://www.poesiacafesf.com/
David Landis, aka “The Gay Gourmet,” is a foodie, a freelance writer, and a retired PR maven. You can email him at: davidlandissf@gmail.com Or visit him online at: www.gaygourmetsf.com
The Gay Gourmet
Published on November 20, 2025
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