When Maria Isgro opened her pasticceria on Christian Street in 1904, South Philadelphia's Italian immigrant community already had a sweet tooth and nowhere near enough places to feed it. More than 120 years later, the bakery she founded — today run by the fourth generation of the family — remains the place South Philly reaches for first when the holiday table needs to look right.
The address has shifted over the decades, but the reputation hasn't. Isgro Pastries now sits on Washington Avenue, and on any given Saturday the line moves past glass cases loaded with rum cake, struffoli, rainbow cookies, and napoleons. The pastry case is genuinely overwhelming in the best Italian-American way: sfogliatelle with their shatteringly crisp shell-shaped layers, zeppole dusted or cream-filled depending on the season, and panforte at Christmastime — dense, dark, and closer to candy than cake. Everything is made in-house, and the production is serious enough to supply not just walk-in customers but wholesale accounts and catering orders across the region.
The Cannoli, Filled to Order — and Not a Minute Before
Visitors making their first trip down 9th Street often ask locals where to get a cannoli.
Nothing defines Isgro more than the cannoli, and nothing about the cannoli is casual. The shells are fried to order in the old Sicilian tradition — golden, blistered, and crackle-crisp — then filled only when a customer is standing at the counter. This is not a marketing gimmick; it is the correct way to make a cannoli. A shell that has been sitting filled for hours turns soft, the ricotta seeps moisture into the pastry, and the entire textural point of the thing is lost. Isgro has been doing it right for so long that Philadelphians who grew up eating them have never had to learn the lesson the hard way.
The ricotta filling is sweetened, lightly perfumed, and finished — in the classic style — with chocolate chips or candied citron, depending on your preference. The proportions are balanced. Nothing is cloyingly sweet; the shell provides enough structure to hold a few bites before it begins to yield. Order a half-dozen and eat them in the car if you must; nobody in South Philly will judge you.
Anchoring the Market Calendar
Isgro's real gravitational pull becomes obvious around the holidays, when the Italian Market hums at a frequency that feels almost pre-modern — a combination of pressure, pleasure, and obligation that is very specifically South Philly. At Easter, the case fills with pastiera and grain pies, the kind of labor-intensive baking that home cooks once made themselves and now, sensibly, outsource to people who have been perfecting the recipes since the Theodore Roosevelt administration. At Christmas, there are struffoli by the pound, anise-scented cookies, and the kind of gift boxes that make Italian grandmothers nod approvingly.
The Seven Fishes doesn't require Isgro's pastries by tradition, but the dessert course often does. A Feast of the Seven Fishes table without a box of cannoli on the counter feels incomplete in the same way a Sunday gravy without pork ribs feels incomplete — technically permissible, instinctively wrong.
What 120 Years Looks Like
Four generations is a long time to maintain a standard. Many of the Italian-immigrant bakeries that opened alongside Isgro on the streets of South Philadelphia are gone, absorbed into strip-mall anonymity or simply closed when the family that ran them ran out of successors willing to start at four in the morning. The Isgro family didn't. The recipes have remained close to their origins, the production stays in-house, and the ethos — fill the cannoli fresh, make the shells properly, don't cut corners on the ricotta — has carried across every generational handoff.
That continuity is, in a neighborhood obsessed with authenticity and deeply suspicious of shortcuts, the highest possible form of credibility. Visitors making their first trip down 9th Street often ask locals where to get a cannoli. The answer is short and consistent: Isgro. Has been for over a century.
- 1904Maria Isgro opens pasticceria on Christian Street, South Philadelphia
- Presentfourth generation operates bakery on Washington Avenue