Crisp sugar glazed crust giving way to flaky pastry and a luscious filling of thick crema pasticceria, the cannoncini at Caffé Milano are a sensory delight. Like mini cannoli, they are a Northern Italy speciality and one that Chef Giorgio Nava makes to perfection. They are baked fresh every day and you can taste and feel that in the contrasting textures, that sparkle with freshness in every moreish mouthful.

The new Caffé Milano is at Local in Heritage Square (the original Caffé Milano in Kloof Street became Carne on Kloof). Walls stripped back to the original stone at the Shortmarket Street entrance to Heritage Square, it’s like diving into a narrow street in the historic centre of an Italian town… even more so when the waft of coffee draws you to the steps up into Caffé Milano. Four colourful café pavement tables sit outside in the covered alley and inside it’s small but cheerful, shelves stacked with a selection of Italian products topped with warm copper jugs and the counter the focus just as in a typical Italian coffee bar. The offering is pared down to a focus on three things – excellent Italian coffee, gorgeous pasticceria (Italian pastries) and breads, and a single savoury offering of a signature fried pizza.

When I visited in April 2021 Giorgio kindly spared me 15 minutes from his hectic schedule. With his restaurants, his new Pasta Fresca range of packaged fresh pastas and sauces, and making the pastries for this café, he’s working 18 hour days, he says, with far fewer staff than he used to due to lockdown, so he’s physically doing a lot more of the making himself. But he’s strong, as he says, and obviously enjoying the challenge of finding ways to keep going without compromising any of his high standards.

For his pastries he doesn’t feel the need to import Italian ingredients “We use local ingredients, they are very good in South Africa, just as good as in Italy, but we follow the Italian tradition, the Italian flavour, the Italian recipe without compromising. I please my palate when making the pastries.” This results for me in the ideal balance of flavour, texture and restrained sweetness – don’t expect sickly sweet cupcakes here. Giorgio shows that there’s more to sweet treats than throwing the sugar packet into the mix, using richness, mouth-pleasing smoothness and crisp crunch for a final irresistible mouthful that has you going back for more.

At the time of writing the range was small. “We have only a few items at the moment as it’s not busy enough to make more. I’d like to have the display full eventually, but we bake everything fresh every single day. I’d rather you come here and find two things that are good and very fresh than ten with some of them being old.”

After Giorgio rushed off to finish the next batch of pastries, I couldn’t resist tasting another of the range on display, a chocolate bigne. This was a completely different experience to the cannoncino. A soft choux pastry shell filled with a gorgeous rich chocolate flavoured filling and iced with chocolate, enough to induce a blissful food coma. I made it last as long as I could, maybe several minutes, though the memory lasts far longer.