Alisa Romano — Pastry Artisan, Breadmaker, and Family Collaborator

Snapshot: who she is

Family & roots

Alisa is one branch of a creative family tree that intertwines architecture, art, and food. She is one of several Drijanski sisters: Sharon (designer and author), Karen (chef in Mexico City), and Pati (Patricia Drijanski — the best-known public figure, a James Beard Award–winning chef and PBS host). Their parents—an architect-turned-restaurateur father and a mother who ran an art gallery—provide the backdrop: a household where structure and color, taste and form, were equally valued. Alisa’s role inside that palette has been the tactile, edible side: flour-dusted, time-tested, quietly brilliant.

She is married to Emilio Romano; together they are publicly noted as hosting and entertaining in Mexico City and raising two daughters. Through these ties she moves easily between professional kitchens, television sets, and intimate dining rooms.

Career & pastry craft

Alisa’s public identity is rooted in pastry and breadmaking. Her work manifests in several forms:

• Recipe contribution: a handful of recipes published under her name—most visibly a marbled pound cake and several cupcake and dessert recipes attributed to “my sister Alisa” on family-focused recipe pages.
• Television participation: recurring family segments and guest appearances on Pati’s shows that emphasize home cooking, desserts, and seasonal family rituals. (Pati’s show first aired in 2011; family-style segments recur across seasons.)
• Festival and event activity: documented appearances at food festivals in the 2010s where she prepared desserts alongside Pati; these public activations read like postcards from a career that moves between elevated home cooking and festival crowds.
• Hospitality & private curation: in 2022 she and her husband hosted curated dinners for small travel groups—menus described as multi-course, locally sourced, and intimately social.

Her work reads as artisanal rather than industrial: small-batch, textured breads and desserts that show the hand and the calendar. You get the sense of someone who times her yeasts by mood and temperature, who thinks in proofing hours and layered flavor rather than in mass-production metrics.

Entrepreneurship & public-facing projects

Though the name “Alisa’s Cupcakery” and references to “Alisa’s Painted Breads” appear in festival captions and social pins, a formal, standalone business storefront is not consistently visible in public records. Instead, the entrepreneurial activity has had a pop-up and event-based shape:

• Festival appearances (documented around 2014) where the Alisa name appeared in menus, photo captions, and event programs.
• Pop-up and private-dinner activity (2020s), where small groups experienced bespoke menus in the couple’s home or curated settings.
• Social and pinboard mentions—visual evidence scattered across social platforms rather than centralized commerce.

This pattern points to a hands-on culinary practice that favors quality over scale, presence over brand expansion.

Timeline (selected public highlights)

Selected appearances & outputs (numbers and dates)

• TV / video clips: Multiple family-segment appearances across at least two seasons spanning the 2010s into the 2020s.
• Festival events: Documented festival activations around 2014 (Food Network / South Beach event series).
• Hospitality events: Private dinner curation and travel-group hosting in April 2022 (curated six-course menus reported in lifestyle coverage).
• Recipe credits: At least one explicitly titled recipe attributed to Alisa (marbled pound cake); additional cupcakes and desserts credited to her on family recipe pages.

Philanthropy & community presence

Public materials link Alisa and her husband to philanthropic gestures—donations cited in institution bulletins—indicating community engagement beyond the kitchen. These donations are not catalogues of wealth; instead they are data points that suggest involvement in education and cultural institutions, and further root the family within civic and cultural networks.

The culinary signature — taste as family language

Alisa’s visible culinary voice is domestic but refined. Think of a loaf that carries brushstrokes of flavor—painted breads, marbled cakes, cupcakes that look like small, edible sculptures. Her role alongside a high-profile sibling—where one sister is a televised ambassador of Mexican food—positions Alisa as the familial artisan: the one who turns family gatherings into staged lessons in texture and memory. She often appears as the quiet catalyst in family episodes, the counterpoint to the spotlight: steady, deliberate, and warm.

A working portrait

Numbers and dates sketch the public outline: festival photos from the mid-2010s, recipe pages across TV seasons beginning in 2011, hospitality events highlighted in 2022, two daughters named in public bios. But behind those facts is a hand that folds dough with familial rhythm. The story that emerges is not that of a celebrity chef seeking billboards; it is that of a culinary professional whose life intersects media, family, and private hospitality—whose pastries and breads become the connective tissue in a family whose public face involves architecture, writing, broadcasting, and design.

Alisa’s work lives in episodes and in dinners, in sugar and salt, in festival flashes and in the steady warmth of an oven door opened for friends and relatives. Her public record reads like a series of vignettes: small, bright moments stitched into a larger family narrative that spans generations and disciplines.