Vesuvio Bakery is the Boss of Bombolinis

Vesuvio Bakery — the reincarnation of a nearly century-old family bakery run by the legendary ‘mayor of Greenwich Village’ Anthony Dapolito — opened its green-painted doors in March of last year, right in time for the first city-wide lockdowns. During the worst part of the pandemic, Vesuvio was a neighborhood oasis for anyone who needed a break from the walls of their apartment.

The food at Vesuvio is as perfectly sugar-coated and rustic-delicious as the atmosphere would suggest. I’ve spent many a morning in Vesuvio, post-gym, masked-up, letting the mid-century jazz salve my soul while waiting for a coffee.

And so I found myself a few days after Christmas, waiting for my cheat day order — a mocha coffee, a bombolini and a chocolate chip cookie. Never mind that Christmas week for me was one long ‘cheat day,’ let’s talk about the chocolate-hazelnut-filled bombolini.

I’m not sure there’s a better way to describe the bombolini then ‘adorable.’ The stuffed little doughnut was the shape and heft of a regulation-size hackey sack.

I have found the first bite of a Vesuvio bombolini, in most cases, will give you a warm mouthful of soft, granulated sugar-covered brioche, slicked from the edges of the Nutella core; every bite thereafter is all hazelnut and milk chocolate, as the filling breaks free of doughy confines and laps onto the rest of the doughnut.

One bombolini will probably be enough to satisfy a typical European tourist, which Vesuvio bakery has seemed to attract as lockdowns have lifted.

Now, onto the cookie — as previously noted, I regularly get down with Vesuvio cookies. I note this only to emphasize the cookie I had on Tuesday, January 29th was the best version of the Vesuvio cookie I’ve had to date.

Number one, it was warm; maybe a happy result of ordering in the morning, but the difference between a warm and room-temperature cookie is like the difference between cream or no cream in coffee. We’re talking radically altered chemical entities, dawg.

Further, the wide, soft cookie possessed a deep caramelized-toffee flavor that I haven't detected in prior cookies; Vesuvio bakers, it seems, are continuing to perfect their methods. Multiple floors of intense chocolatey chunks were layered into the dough like fossils in soil, or NYC denizens in a typical residential building.

Vesuvio have got themselves a contender; I’d stack their cookie against any of downtown Manhattan’s chocolate-chip cookie heavyweights.

Urban exodus, dining restrictions and neighborhood riots didn’t stop Vesuvio in 2020, and I doubt the bakery will be much bruised by whatever challenges the new year brings. Matter of fact, any challenges that come my way in 2021, I'll greet ‘em with a cookie and a bombolini — it’s darn hard to be unhappy while a place like Vesuvio exists.

Until next time.