St. Paul's Cossetta's marks 115 years of Italian food, sausage and panettone in St. Paul
A baby is calling Jaime Martinez, sometimes at 3 a.m. The baby is panettone.
Martinez is the executive bakery chef at Cossetta's, the St. Paul Italian market and pizzeria that is celebrating 115 years. His team sometimes starts work at 3 a.m. to make everything from scratch.
"We wake up, and oh, it's calling me. The baby is calling me," Martinez said.
Asked by WCCO's John Lauritsen whether the panettone is his baby, Martinez replied, "Yeah, it's our baby."
Martinez said one of his main ingredients is passion. He fell in love with panettone, a sweet bread that originated in Italy 500 years ago, and named one of his pets after the chocolate version.
The bread needs a lot of attention. It takes about 56 hours from the time the dough is first made to the time it reaches the shelves at Cossetta's. The bakery has won first place at the national level and recently competed in an international panettone competition in Italy.
That attention to detail runs through the whole place, which is the focus of this week's Finding Minnesota. Michael and Irene Cossetta were the original owners of the market, which WCCO has reported opened in 1911. They first opened a small place by the levee in St. Paul, but business was slow until they moved to Seventh Street.
"He found this barber school was for sale. So, he had the guts to go to the bank and ask for a loan," said Filippo Caffari, Cossetta's executive chef and historian.
The building has since grown to three floors with hundreds of seats. Caffari, 72, was born in Italy and still comes to work every day.
"I love it. Look, I'm 72, and I still come to work," he said.
Caffari said Cossetta's sees more than 100 customers a day, and currently has 13 or 14 types of sausage. Four generations of the Cossetta family have specialized in salads, sandwiches, pasta and pizza by the slice. It's rumored they have enough recipes to fill a library.
Whether it's sweet bread or spaghetti and meatballs, the goal is to be as perfect as possible, and there's a word for that at Cossetta's.
"Bonissimo. Good is not enough. Super good. That's bonissimo," Caffari said.
