You can buy Giuseppe’s limoncello? Inside popular Pismo restaurant’s new distillery

One of San Luis Obispo County’s most beloved Italian restaurants has always made its own limoncello.

But now, it’s distilling the purest vodka and using all farm-fresh ingredients for the liquor straight from its own mini distillery in Pismo Beach — and selling the limoncello to its bevy of fans.

Giuseppe’s Italian American Club opened in Pismo Beach in July, changing its name from Giuseppe’s Express and adding a deli, gelato shop, restaurant, full bar and, notably, a distillery. The Price Street spot is an offshoot of the adjacent original Giuseppe’s Cucina Italiana, a longtime San Luis Obispo County Italian food favorite.

So how has it gotten into the limoncello business?

Back in November, the distillery began working full force to make its own 180-proof vodka.

“Once we started, the vodka was so popular, it became such a hit,” manager Aurash Afshar told The Tribune. “People, they’re coming in, buying six bottles at a time. It’s now in all three of our restaurants, and it was shortly after the vodka, we decided, ‘Hey, why aren’t we doing this with limoncello?’”

And so far, people have been “loving that,” Afshar said.

A bottle of DiFronzo Limoncello, named after Giuseppe’s owner Joe DiFronzo, costs $23. The full bottle is only available for sale at the club, but anyone can buy shots of the liquor at either of the restaurant’s locations in Pismo Beach or San Luis Obispo. Distiller Ulisses Avina makes approximately 70 to 80 bottles of the liquor every two weeks.

He said though its “an extensive process” that can take some time, “for the most part everything’s easy.”

“It’s foolproof,” Avina told The Tribune. “People have been doing this around the world for a long time, and everybody has their own methods, their own recipe, and some of them are closely kept family secrets and stuff like that, but we like to research and develop.”

Avina spends four hours shaving the rind of the lemon and steeps it in the house-made vodka for two weeks, before adding the sugar and bottling the limoncello into its 375-milliliter bottles.

The restaurant’s newest liquor is also featured in popular cocktails like the limoncello spritz and lemon meringue martini.

“We’re happy to have a niche where it fits in, where we have the space to do this, and it works with both our restaurants,” Afshar said. “We didn’t do anything that was too far out of the line of what you would see in a classic Italian pizza bar.

“We all work together to keep things in the box, so the distillation, homegrown lemons, vodka, high proof, limoncello vodka, it all makes sense for us here,” he added.

All the fresh ingredients, including the Sorrento lemons used in the limoncello, are grown on DiFronzo’s 12-acre farm in Edna Valley, a few miles from the restaurant’s Pismo Beach location.

“We make everything from scratch. Everything before it was trendy, before it was cool — we were doing it,” DiFronzo quipped to The Tribune. “Everything on that menu you look at, all the way down to the limoncello and the vodka. I mean, what’s left? I don’t know. Can we make the cardboard? Glass for the wine? I don’t know where to go from this.”

So what is next for the Giuseppe’s distillery? Right now, they’re pretty happy producing what they are, Avina said.

“We like where we’re at, we’re small, we have great outlets with our restaurants, and kind of want to keep it that way,” he said. “There’s no point in growing just for growth’s sake.”

Despite that, another liquor that can be made in their house distillery could eventually pop up around the shop.

“When we get to that point, I will be making a case for doing a whiskey program,” Avina said. “But for right now, we’ve got limoncello, we’ve got vodka, we pour the gin out of the bar, and that’s kind of what we’re staying for right now.”

For more information

Giuseppe’s Italian American Club at 801 Price St. is open every day from 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.

For more information about the Italian restaurant and bar’s limoncello program, visit its Instagram or website at giuseppesrestaurant.com.