La Bella Ferrara has been delighting denizens of Little Italy and countless visitors since the late 1800s, according to its fourth-generation owner Liz Lee Grazioso, but it never expanded to Brooklyn before she took the business over from her godfather in 2021. 

“I grew up in the cafe and the bakery,” Lee Grazioso says, referring to the present Manhattan shop and its previous sit-down space, which closed in the twenty-teens. “I fell in love with it when I was very young, like a teenager. If I didn’t take over, the chance of the bakery being closed forever was very high. I would never, never, if I could help it, let the bakery go, because there’s so much history in that building,” she says.