The pastry chef bringing a slice of Italy to Kensington is up for a James Beard award tonight

Justine MacNeil’s hands seem to hover over the brioche dough as she shapes it from amorphous mounds into perfectly round balls that will eventually bake into maritozzi that yawn wide with sweet cream.

Her touch is incredibly light. The trick, MacNeil said, is to tighten your grip on the dough almost imperceptibly as you roll it, and to avoid working on anything that isn’t wood. The grain helps guide her to find the right surface tension to keep the ball firm.

Getting that feel is crucial to MacNeil, the pastry chef at Fiore, the casual Italian cafe in East Kensington that she co-owns with her husband, Ed Crotchet. There, MacNeil’s commitment to Italian dessert deep cuts — marzipan-esque ricciarelli cookies, Tuscan torta della nonna, crusty schiacciata sandwich bread, and the maritozzi that are just starting to become trendy outside of Rome — draws lines out the door almost every weekend alongside praise so effusive it sounds fake.

MacNeil’s flaky cornetti are “the closest you’ll get to what they have in Italy,” acclaimed restaurateur Greg Vernick told The Inquirer in April. They’re also part of what made her a finalist for the outstanding pastry chef award at the 2026 James Beard Foundation Awards, where winners will be revealed tonight in Chicago.

MacNeil is one of seven chefs representing Philly at the awards, and one of the city’s only first-time nominees.

» READ MORE: Philly scores seven 2026 James Beard Award finalists

“I’ve always respected the awards, but I didn’t know if what we were doing would garner their attention,” MacNeil, 38, told The Inquirer in May. “I just never feel like where I’m at is complete, like I’m never going to learn it all. But [that] doesn’t deter me.”

MacNeil’s approach stands out in the era of the social media bakery, where the internet’s trend cycle seems to dictate what ought to end up in a pastry case, from brown butter or gochujang everything to morning buns shoehorned with matcha and ube fillings and cakes crusted in nonpareils.

Fiore’s pastries aren’t going for virality. They’re faithful adaptations of Italian baked goods, a genre distinct from Italian American baking. You won’t often find rainbow cookies on Fiore’s menu, which can sometimes cycle through 20 unique pastries a day. But you may, for example, find Pastiera Napoletana, a time-intensive Easter pie from Naples that suspends wheat berries in a citrusy and fluffy ricotta filling.

The restaurant’s old-school Italian ethos stems, in part, from MacNeil’s single-minded devotion to doing things the exacting, traditional way. MacNeil tests every pastry that ends up on Fiore’s menu, working from a tiny counter in the restaurant’s ground-floor kitchen, that she affectionately calls “the lab.” There, she makes multiple versions of a recipe with minor variations in one go so they can be compared. Often, said Crochet, only she can tell the difference.

“I’ve seen her do seven different versions of the same thing and taste them all side-by-side,” he said. MacNeil “is not reinventing the wheel. She’s taking these traditional recipes, tweaking them, and making them her own by creating the best version of whatever it is.”

Baking was not MacNeil’s first plan. Dancing was.

MacNeil, who grew in Jackson, N.J., trained in ballet and Graham technique at a vocational high school and planned to study dance in college when she tore her in ACL in 2007. Sidelined and taking classes at a community college, MacNeil fell in love with baking through her best friend’s mom, who taught her how to make traditional Greek cookies.

“She would always tell me, ‘I don’t know the real recipe, but here’s what I did’ which made so much sense in my mind. She was crafting something beautiful from memory,” said MacNeil.

Plus, there was something about it that she said felt like dancing.

“There’s rules, but there’s fluidity and movement … I’m constantly trying to feel connected to the Earth, and I think that’s why I’m attracted to fields where I use my body and my hands. You use your personhood to make something,” she said.

MacNeil enrolled at the pastry program at New York City’s International Culinary Center (then called the French Culinary Institute) a year later. After graduating, MacNeil said it took trials at “at least 10″ different restaurants before landing her first job in 2009: a service and pastry cook with Tom Colicchio’s Craft company, where Crochet was a chef de cuisine.

Crochet said he and MacNeil barely interacted, but he was struck by the way she could immediately answer stressful questions off the top of her head, like how to accommodate a dietary restriction. MacNeil said she liked how Crochet was good at small talk.

Their relationship was a slow burn, MacNeil said. The pair didn’t start dating until 2013, when she was a pastry chef at the Michelin-starred Italian restaurant Del Posto and Crochet worked next door at Colicchio & Sons. They wed in 2017.

MacNeil stayed at Del Posto for six years until 2017, ultimately becoming executive pastry chef. Working there, she said, helped her trust her palate and perspective, though she felt like she didn’t put her stamp on the dessert menu until the end.

Her old co-workers beg to differ.

“If you want to know something, Don’t Google it. Ask Justine,” said Brooks Headley the Superiority Burger founder and former Del Posto executive pastry chef who hired MacNeil. Her superpower, he said, was ice cream. Headley, who won the Beard award for outstanding pastry chef in 2013, calls MacNeil when his restaurant’s ice cream machine is on the fritz.

Kim Janusz, the pastry chef at Chicago’s Beard award-winning Lula Cafe, also hangs onto MacNeil’s knowledge. When they were both sous chefs at Del Posto, MacNeil taught her a hack for candying nuts that Janusz still uses to this day.

Inside Fiore’s downstairs kitchen, MacNeil and two of the restaurant’s bakers find a groove amid a playlist of surf rock, 2000s indie hits, and the occasional throwback R&B banger. It’s a contrast, MacNeil said, to the low hum of Del Posto’s service kitchen, where she recalled chefs weren’t allowed to play music or talk above a whisper.

Fiore’s pastry room, meanwhile, is full of giggles: MacNeil laughs while showing off the team’s celebrity crush-themed calendar, which a coworker designed. She chuckles and asks if she’s saying too much while explaining the process for Fiore’s beloved cornetti, Italian croissants that MacNeil said takes three days to make and involve laminating layers of centimeter-thick dough. She smirks while handing over a ricciarelli fresh out the oven. The traditional almond cookie from Siena, Italy, involves baking the dough at three different temperatures and tastes like a meringue.

“They’ve been doing it this way for hundreds of years so I’m going to do the same," MacNeil said.

Crochet and MacNeil moved to Philly in 2017 after he was hired to lead Rat’s Restaurant in Hamilton, N.J. The plan was for MacNeil to open a bakery and gelato shop, she said, until the couple realized that Philly was affordable enough to open a restaurant together.

They opened the first iteration of Fiore in 2019 as a 78-seat Italian restaurant at 757 S. Front St. with pastas, focaccia sandwiches, pastries, and sorbettos that Inquirer critic Craig LaBan said “were worth crossing town for.”

The new plan was going swimmingly, MacNeil and Crochet said, until it wasn’t: The restaurant had been broken into six times, and hiring after the pandemic proved difficult. And when the couple had their first son, Roman, in 2022, working 10 to 12 hours a day, between brunch and dinner service, felt untenable.

“I had this idea that we would just figure it out. [Roman] would just come to the restaurant and be a nighttime kid … He’ll adapt,” said MacNeil. “No matter what anyone tells you, you adapt to them.”

It was MacNeil’s idea to close the original Fiore down in 2023 and relocate to its current location in East Kensington. Crochet said he “had to be dragged kicking and screaming,” but that in the end, his wife was right.

The couple reopened Fiore roughly seven months later. The most time-consuming part, Crochet recalls, was MacNeil organizing her recipes. She “took all of her notebooks that have all of her recipes in it — like hundreds and hundreds of recipes — and she bought new notebooks and just rewrote them because she felt like it was the most sensible thing to do," he said.

Now, all of MacNeil’s recipes are typed in a color-coded binder, with Post-its flagging the tiniest of revisions. All of it, she said, was part of the process, locking them in her memory and exposing holes that needed filling.

“So much of what they teach you in [culinary] school is repetition,” MacNeil said. “They’re all building blocks, but unless you do something a bunch of times it feels unnatural.”

The current Fiore has just 20 seats and functions as a daytime only catch-all restaurant, bakery, and cafe. It’s also a space where MacNeil shines, handling all the bread, some pasta dough, and wintertime hot chocolate on top their rotating pastries.

Typically, MacNeil works from 6 a.m. until about 3 p.m., overseeing a kitchen that splits its days equally between baking and prepping. When The Inquirer visited in May, she and her team had already spent the day baking cornetti; buns to be stuffed for maritozzi; bomboloni; dough for pizza bianca; milk buns and schiacciata for breakfast sandwiches; and a semolina crostada cake to be coated with chocolate ganache. They all sat in neat rows on a cooling rack.

Fiore goes through 400 bomboloni, traditional Italian doughnuts, weekly. It’s the most popular item on the restaurant’s menu. The restaurant also goes through upward of 300 cornetti a week and 225 maritozzi, which MacNeil finds a little bemusing. Fiore sells them all day long, but in Italy, the cream-stuffed buns are a breakfast pastry.

Crochet said his wife cried when she found out she was a James Beard finalist in March. Headley — her former boss was unsurprised. “Every accolade Justine has gotten just makes me so proud,” he said. “You want the people who work under you to do better than you and make you look stupid.”

Headley said that moment came two years ago, when Crochet and MacNeil hosted a pop-up at Superiority Burger and he tasted slabs of her focaccia. “It tasted like floating on olive-oil flavored air with a crispy bottom,” he said.

MacNeil, for her part, is focused on climbing the next hill: Mastering Zeppole di San Giuseppe, a Neapolitan Father’s Day pastry that’s a ring of cream-stuffed choux. It’s taken five years, a trip to Naples that turned into a zeppole crawl, and a YouTube video she had to translate from Italian, but MacNeil thinks they’re finally ready to leave the lab.

She has no regrets about it — or getting to Fiore’s current version — taking this long.

“I don’t know if I could’ve been able to do this if I didn’t work through everything else first,” MacNeil said.