Elise Gold won’t tell me where she gets her ricotta. “It’s so weird to be all nana about this,” she says, keeping the secret like a Sicilian grandma. “I’ll just say it’s a high-quality ricotta that you can’t easily get.” It’s for her cannoli. Maybe, she wonders aloud while packing up her recently closed micro bakery on SE 81st Avenue, it’s their “incredibly bubbly, crunchy, crispness” against the ricotta’s soft curds that makes her cannoli singular. She concludes, simply, that “They’re special,” her voice warbling with so much affection that you have no choice but to believe her.

After four years in Montavilla, she’s preparing to reopen with triple the space and 40 indoor seats in Sellwood (8235 SE 13th Ave) on March 7. She opened Sebastiano’s with her husband, Dan Gold, at the start of the pandemic. Despite the modest scale, and zero indoor seating, they quickly won a spot among our 2020 Best New Restaurants, serving hulking muffuletta sandwiches, focaccia dimpled with Castelvetrano olives, dainty Italian cookies. And those cannoli—dark chocolate shards on one end, house-candied orange peel on the other—even caught the eye of senator Ron Wyden. Needless to say, they outgrew the 690-square-foot storefront before they opened it.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, Dan says they’ll be adding leg room (in the kitchen and the dining room), which will resolve a “scarcity element”: lacking adequate production space, they were constantly selling out of everything. Speaking of wheels, fear not: the tire-size muffuletta isn’t going anywhere. Dan is known to wax poetic on Instagram about its intricacies: stacks of cold cuts from both Olympia Provisions and Revel Meat Co. pile high on a sesame seed–crusted loaf with olive salad; a vegetarian version swaps in marinated eggplant. Sicilian immigrants in New Orleans invented the sandwich a century ago, fashioning the traditional namesake loaf into an economical, circular party sub. The Golds followed suit, making eight sandwiches at once—a pragmatic move that birthed a star.

In their new spot, which sits in the quaint strip of businesses that once housed the original Either/Or café, Sebastiano’s daytime-only hours will double, from 11am to 3pm to 9am to 5pm, making room for afternoon “aperitivo hours.” Think amari, negroni marmellata, and no doubt a few spritzes on the courtyard patio, paired with antipasti and hot Sicilian doughnuts, like the ricotta-fortified sfingi, and brioche-based bomboloni and cartocci (the latter resembles a fluffy, spiralized cannolo).

And of course, they’ll continue selling fresh pasta and breads at three farmers markets, producing their wholesale line of marmellata, and catering events with their Sprinter van that sports an old-world paint job, “Seb’s Party Wagon.”

It’s a good bet that it will all be painstakingly crafted, intimately personal, and endearingly idiosyncratic. In short: special.