The Luxury Makeover of the Worst Pastry on Earth

On the internet, there exists a $102 loaf of bread that people talk about like it’s a drug. It’s a panettone—the fruitcake-adjacent yeasted bread that is traditional to Italy, and to Christmastime—and it is made by the California chef Roy Shvartzapel. Like most panettone, it looks like a giant muffin, with a dramatic domed top and gold-printed paper wrapping around its sides. It is, according to the box, “carefully crafted” by, among other things, “an endless drive to control time and nature, and a passion to please the senses.” (Okay!) Dan Riesenberger, a panettone maker in Columbus, Ohio, told me Shvartzapel’s version has “mind-blowing texture.” Rachel Tashjian Wise, a fashion critic at The Washington Post, tried the one that Shvartzapel made for Gucci (!) last year and told me in an email that “it. is. spectacular,” emphasis hers. A bakery TikToker, one of the many who have posted about Shvartzapel’s product, described eating it as “a spiritual experience.” I will take their word for it, because I have no way of knowing myself: Shvartzapel sold out of Christmas panettone on December 1.

People liking pastries is not really revolutionary, nor is the idea of internet fame for snacks. But the weird thing about this one is that people do not really like panettone, generally or historically speaking. At their best, the panettoni I’ve had were forgettable; otherwise, they were dense, sweet, stale, cloying, and aggressively perfumed, like a dry sponge that had spent too much time in a Bath & Body Works. In 2013, The Guardian ran a story headlined “Save Us From Panettone—The Festive Delicacy Nobody Likes.” A few years later, Lovin Malta, which bills itself as Malta’s biggest online publication, called the local luxury “literally the worst thing on the face of the earth.” Even people who have devoted their lives to panettone acknowledge that it has an image problem. Riesenberger called it “a regiftable item”; Shvartzapel told me that when he first started selling his panettoni, in 2015, many people wondered who would spend so much money on a product that “nobody in America even likes.”

The problem with most panettone, the fancy panettone guys will tell you, is not the panettone—it’s the mass production. Good panettone is finicky and labor intensive, made in a multiday, multiphase process: fermenting, rising, mixing, rising, mixing, shaping, cutting, baking, hanging upside down like a bat so its top doesn’t cave in while it cools—each stage of which can conceivably go wrong. Structures collapse; starters get overly acidic; dough rises too much, or not enough, or unevenly, or oddly. “Every time, it humbles you,” Riesenberger said. Brian Francis, a writer and home cook based in Toronto, tried making one three years ago; “in short,” he told me, “it was a journey into hell.” Many grocery-store panettoni are produced in large quantities using cheap ingredients, then stored for months before being sold for Christmas. This makes them dry, or necessitates the use of preservatives, or more likely both. A Riesenberger panettone, which sells for $105, requires $20 in ingredients—local pasture-raised eggs, high-quality chocolate, wild yeast, special Italian flour he hunts down online—and about four days of skilled labor and close attention to make, before it is shipped fresh.

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Certain fetish foods have a life cycle: They are hated, and then they are elevated by well-meaning obsessives via the use of premium ingredients and better production techniques, and then liking these foods becomes a symbol of taste and sophistication, of being in on something. “Getting it,” in the figurative sense, becomes as much a prize as having it, in the material sense. “You see the unboxing videos, and it starts this spiral effect of: I need to try this, I need to understand what’s going on here,” the food influencer Katie Zukhovich told me. “I don’t think people can imagine that panettone is so good because it’s always been so fine.”

We’ve done this before. Canned fish was depressing before a few savvy, Millennial-oriented brands started putting high-quality seafood in beautiful containers, after which “hot girls eat tinned fish” became something people would actually say out loud. Licorice, one of the universally most reviled flavors known to the human tongue, is now the subject of endless video taste tests after having received a European glow-up. Panettone was the worst thing on Earth, and then it was redeemed.

Now we are in the third phase of the trend: The market is saturated, both with very good versions and also with mediocre but well-branded ones, and also with different products that are not food at all but that signal insider status in the same way that a tote bag printed with anchovies does. As I write this, TikTok contains more than 60,000 videos hashtagged #panettone. Gucci sells a $140 panettone, though it is no longer baked by Schvartzapel; Dolce & Gabbana and Moschino also sell them, in partnership with Italian manufacturers. Online gift guides are lousy with it, as are specialty food shops. Last winter, Anthropologie sold a panettone-shaped candle for $98. When I got on the phone with Stephen Zagor, an adjunct professor of food entrepreneurship at Columbia University, he told me that “it seems like panettone is taking on a life in excess of itself.”

An expensive panettone does not really need to taste good, even though many do. “Food is two things,” Zagor said. “It is what exists in reality, and it is the image that we create online and how we perceive it. And they’re not always the same … People buy the ethereal and not the reality.” In his classes, Zagor talks about “taking the common and making it special, and taking the special and making it common”: creating a product that’s decadent but not too inaccessible, one that appeals both to the top of the market and to its aspirational underclass. A hundred bucks is an awful lot to spend on a snack, but if you think of premium panettone not as food, exactly, but as entry into a certain consumer stratum—one that is discerning, sophisticated, and at least a little rich—it’s a bargain.

No wonder high-end clothing companies have gotten in on panettone. It is, the fashion writer Becky Malinsky told me in an email, “a digestible (no pun intended!) way to gift an easily recognizable luxury name without spending, say, $2,300 on a handbag.” High-fashion panettone allows brand-conscious consumers to own an otherwise unattainable label, and clout-conscious fashion houses to participate in a trend popular among young, influential people, without diluting their brands—panettone is, after all, still a fussy, old-world, high-priced Italian good, just one that happens to be handcrafted out of flour and sugar instead of silk or leather.

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Dolce & Gabbana’s panettone is manufactured in Sicily by a 71-year-old company and then shipped worldwide inside chic little collectible tins with a hand-painted look. A few weeks ago, I ordered one. It was the size of your average single-serve coffee-shop pastry and cost me $44.95 before shipping. It was dramatically more expensive than the grocery-store panettone I’d bought for comparison purposes—45 cents a gram versus 2.2 cents a gram—and marginally more delicious, which was really not very delicious at all.

Clearly, I had played myself. My ultra-fancy panettone—the one that looked and was expensive, the one that bore the outward signals we’ve come to associate with high quality and traditional craft—was all the things that the fancy panettone guys had warned me to avoid: It had been mass-produced and was filled with preservatives and other ingredients few nonnas would recognize. (Maybe, in retrospect, I should have been tipped off by the fact that it was available on Amazon Prime.) But I had bought the $45 muffin, and I wanted it to transform me: For a minute there, I began to convince myself that maybe panettone just tastes that way and I was the problem.

A few days later, one of Riesenberger’s panettoni arrived in the mail. It was nearly a foot tall, with a crackly, almond-sugar topping; deep pockets of rich chocolate and pistachio; and a texture simultaneously dense like custard and light like clouds. I finally got it, and I finally get it. His panettone was as different from the other two as watching a movie about a drug trip is to doing the drugs yourself. It was spectacular—emphasis very much mine.