A Mission chef for 18 years is returning, this time opening Pasta Supply Co. by the end of April at Mission and 22nd streets, chef and owner Anthony Strong confirmed on Wednesday.
The space was last occupied by Dumpling Club. Strong’s enterprise will be a pasta grocery store by day and a dining site at night.
“There was, honestly, like, no other place that I even considered putting it,” said Strong, who has tested the restaurant in Richmond for the last year. That site at 236 Clement St. will remain open.
Strong first moved to the Mission near 22nd and South Van Ness Avenue in 2006. Since then, he has run three popular restaurants here: Pizzeria Delfina on 18th Street, Locanda on Valencia Street, and his own Italian spot, Prairie, which closed in August 2020.
“I miss cooking here a lot,” Strong said. “I want to bring this right back to the Mission, drop it right in the middle, and bring our quirky approach to Italian down there.”
For Strong, watching people buying pasta at a supermarket is “torture.”
Standing in front of the pasta shelf, facing a wall of mass-produced spaghetti, penne and linguine, Strong saw couples asking each other: “What brand do we get?” “How much sauce should we buy?”
Buying pasta should be “an enjoyable experience that could be part of everybody’s routine,” he said. In his pasta shop, employees will walk you through the process: They have taught a customer “who only had mac and cheese in a blue box” how to cook pasta, and then helped him curate a first dinner with his new girlfriend.
In the new space at 3233 22nd St., a skylight lets in abundant light, and the walls are painted a subtle shade of sage green, a deliberate choice to make the pasta’s yellow color pop.
During the day, customers will be greeted by four glass display cases filled with more than 30 types of pastas, more than 20 sauces, and Strong’s “favorite butter on the planet,” from Hope Creamery in his home state Minnesota.
Strong will also offer weekly pasta classes, where customers can learn to make pasta from scratch in a dozen shapes and cook it properly.
In the evening, from 5 to 9 p.m., the retail space will turn into a walk-in dining room with a small menu, serving dishes from simple butter and cheese mafaldine to seasonal Dungeness crab fugatini. Orders will be taken at the door, and Strong said the food will be ready minutes after being seated.
When there’s a line, customers can wait at the bar, watching pasta get made in realtime, including a filling canister for the ravioli and large conveyor belts shuffling flat pasta from a pasta sheeter machine.
This combination, Strong said, gives the business “a couple of legs to stand on,” an industry lesson that he acquired the hard way. His previous restaurant, Prairie, closed in August 2020, after an unsuccessful attempt to flip it into a grocery spot during the pandemic. Offering both a grocery store and restaurant gives him “fewer ups and downs between a slower Tuesday and a busy Saturday night,” he said.
Almost all the pasta dishes on the menu will be under $20, and pre-packaged house-made pastas are usually $8.50 for two large bowls, Strong said. The cheapest sauces in store will also be around $8.50. There are “opportunities to splurge” on truffle or crab pastas, but affordability is the goal for Strong.
“I didn’t want to be that bougie pasta boutique that’s selling pastas for $40 a pound,” he said. “What we really need are some places that get affordable dinners to people, at home and out.”
As part of the plan to keep things affordable, Strong has been his own architect and designer for the new space. On Wednesday afternoon, he was in knee pads and a black shirt covered in dust, laying tiles flat, installing shelves and sawing butcher-block tables.
Home improvement has become his lullaby: These days, he said, he falls asleep to the sound of “some dude showing how to anchor a pole in concrete” on YouTube.
Opening the Mission location, Strong said, was both an expansion opportunity and a necessity, as the team needed space for making more sauce.
The restaurant’s space at 3233 22nd St. is about 1.5 times bigger than its Clement Street space, which had two burners, one pasta cooker and a convection oven that only fit half-sized trays.
Bringing Pasta Supply Co. back to the Mission draws a full circle for Strong. Yet, being a chef in San Francisco for all these years, he knows well the challenges of running a restaurant in the city.
“The screws tighten a little bit on your profitability every year, on the ease of doing business,” Strong said.
But he loves it, and is having fun.
“I’ve always been the kid that loved to look at a disaster, like the chaotic floor full of Legos, and just try to create something magical out of it,” Strong said. “Even if the pieces aren’t fitting together.”
Welcome home, chef. Cannot wait.
Anthony and his crew are amazing, as are their products. We’ve been driving to Clement to get his stuff, so pleased to be able to walk and grab! His pesto is awesome!