Why go
The cake that names the bench
The Jessica cake gives the bench its first cue. Fabrizio Galla works as pastry chef at Fabrizio Galla in San Sebastiano Da Po, where the shop and adjoining laboratory opened in 2010. The house is not arranged around restaurant service; it is a pastry shop in the Piedmontese sense, with the laboratory doing the serious speaking before the counter ever fills. Galla was born in Chivasso in 1973 and lives in San Sebastiano Da Po; his parents ran a restaurant there for more than thirty years. Before this shop, he spent a decade in laboratories across Italy and later worked at La Farmacia del Cambio, then opened an artisanal chocolate laboratory alongside the family business. That path matters here because the place still reads as a lab with a retail face: cakes, mignons, chocolates, confectionery, gelato, sweet and savory pastries, festive leavened goods. The title of the place is also the maker’s name, which can make the craft feel direct. A cake leaves the bench under the same name as the hand that set the program.
Piedmontese pastry, chocolate first
Galla’s production is described by the house as entirely artisanal, rooted in Piedmontese pastry and built across several disciplines rather than one signature case. The range runs from classic and modern small cakes to mignon pastries, panettone, colomba, cookies, fruit preserves, spreadable creams, jarred creams, chocolate tablets and confectionery. Chocolate is not a side language here. The shop lists white, gianduia, milk chocolate, 70% dark and 75% dark tablets, and the biography of the maker places him in confectionery and chocolaterie as much as in pastry. The Torta Felicità gives the clearest technical map: 70% dark chocolate mousse, Santo Domingo chocolate sponge, Madagascar and Tahiti vanilla cream, gianduia cream and chocolate crunch. It is a pastry architecture built from origin, texture and temperature discipline, even when the house keeps the bench method to itself. The public philosophy is plain enough: a return to authentic flavors from the tradition of Piedmontese pastry. The work stays broad, but the center holds in chocolate, mignon precision and festive leavened products.
A quiet counter for finished work
The San Sebastiano Da Po shop is small in feeling and product-forward in use, a refined pastry room rather than a dining room. The counter has to carry several kinds of appetite at once: a customer collecting a cake, someone choosing mignons, someone reading the chocolate tablets by percentage, someone buying panettone or colomba as a seasonal object. The atmosphere is described by the house through elegance, tradition and high-quality confectionery, and that matches the structure of the offer. Nothing in the public description asks the room to perform theatre. The theatre has already happened in the laboratory. What remains visible is finish: glaze, cut, shell, crumb, cream, the scale of individual pastries beside cakes made for a table. The operation also extends beyond the counter, with physical collection tied to the San Sebastiano Da Po point of sale and an online shop that carries the same categories. Even there, the craft vocabulary stays intact. Leavened products, chocolate, creams, cakes and preserves are not treated as souvenirs; they are the house’s working forms.
Recognition without changing the method
The pastry shop has been awarded Three Cakes by the Gambero Rosso pastry guide, and Galla entered the Italian group of Relais Dessert International in 2019. The Accademia Maestri Pasticceri Italiani named him Pasticcere dell’Anno in 2020, and APEI elected him Best Pastry Chef of Italy 2024 on 7 May 2024. Those honors sit around the work rather than replacing it. The more concrete line remains the San Sebastiano Da Po laboratory opened in 2010, where the Jessica cake, liquorini, mignons and Piedmontese desserts still define the hand.
