Italy in Larkspur The cheapest trip to Italy is a visit to Larkspur. Walk through its quaint, blocks-long downtown until you come to an elegant storefront with mahogany-framed plate-glass windows and a few small tables perched on a partially enclosed, travertine marble patio. Push open the heavy glass door and... Italy. Luscious cakes and cookies and tarts overflowing with a profusion of ripe, colorful fruit. Panettone. Panini on house-baked focaccia and thick wedges of ricotta, prosciutto and sun-dried tomato Torta. The heady aroma of espresso, brewed from a special blend of beans roasted on premises. Ten varieties of gelato. En enormous variety of chocolates. Wines from Tuscany and Veneto and Alto Adige. You're in Emporio Rulli, the gastronomic progeny of a small, unassuming, dark-haired man who occasionally slips out of the backroom kitchen to discuss the attributes of Italian wines or survey customers who've come to purchase products of a quality rarely seen outside the finest pastry shops of Florence or Milan. The man is Gary Rulli, a 36-year-old native of San Francisco who on Thanksgiving Day, 1988, threw open the doors of a tiny, 600-square-foot shop, which he called Pasticceria ("Pastry Shop") Rulli. With $150,000 scraped together from savings and a loan on his parents' home, Rulli took over a former restaurant, completely remodeled the interior and began turning out the exquisite Italian pastries and confections that he'd been learning to make since a high-school student working part time at a local donut shop. It never occurred to him it wouldn't be a raging success. "I always felt that if I worked hard enough, there was no way I wasn't going to make it," he says. Almost 10 years later, Emporio Rulli has expanded twice, more than tripling its size, adding wares far beyond original Italian breads and pastries and changing its name from Pasticceria to Emporio. Now the modest little shop is gorgeous mélange of polished mahogany, rich marble and gleaming glass. Once a month it features some of the Bay Area's most accomplished Italian chefs, who prepare elaborate, multi-course, prix fixe dinners, each course paired with hard-to-find Italian wines sold in its jam-packed enoteca. Italy has always been Gary Rulli's inspiration. Indeed, every year he returns to that country to work with and learn from its pastry masters. "Just being in Italy artistically improves you," he says. "It stimulates me, makes me want to take the store to another level." Italy is also where he began his real culinary education. In 1982, after a year at Victoria Pastry Co. in North Beach, he took his savings and moved to a small town near Turin to absorb the Italian way of baking. Apprenticing in the traditional European manner, he attended pastry school in the day time and working without salary in pastry shop at night. He didn't mind. "I thought it was great," Rulli says. "I was working 12, 14-hour days, but I looked at it like I was just going to sacrifice for the next year-and-a-half, learn as much as I could and worry about traveling and other things later. The whole time I felt that I was saving a little piece of lost art. That if I didn't absorb it, it would be gone. I really respected these 60, 70-year-old pastry chefs who'd been doing it for 40 years - their passion for quality. I always thought if I could bring back to the San Francisco Bay Area, produce these things that they'd been doing in Italy for years, it would be a great idea." It was an idea he made reality upon returning to the U.S. in 1984. Renting space in a commercial kitchen, he began selling his pastries to restaurants around the Bay Area. After filing to secure a San Francisco location for the pastry shop of his dreams, Rulli cam across the Larkspur site and thought that perhaps Marin's affluent, well-traveled population would be a good fit for his uncompromisingly Italian creations. How uncompromising? It took three years to convince him to offer customers non-fat and low-fat milk for their cappuccinos and lattes. "I never felt the quality would be the same," he maintains. For the same reason, he refuses to make muffins or bagels or any other popular but hardly Italian pastry shop, we're going to be an authentic Italian pastry shop. I just kind of stuck to that and eventually it did work out."    - By Bill Citara    Article courtesy of Examiner Magazine - January 18, 1998