Los Gatos, rejoice! The Pastaria is now open for lunch, Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 3pm. The restaurant that specializes in pasta was opened by Donna Novi in 1995. In mid-December 2019, it moved to the spot that used to be Opa! on the west end of North Santa Cruz Avenue.
Novi, who grew up in San Francisco, opened the restaurant with only takeout orders for her freshly made pastas and sauces. But soon, she had to change the business plan because people wanted to sit down. She saw that the space that used to be a Greek restaurant was empty and needed more cold storage. The walk-in fridge was very big, and the wood-fired pizza oven let you make a lot of different kinds of pizza.
Novi began working on a bigger menu with her son Devon Coen, who learned to cook at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena and has worked for her since he was 15. Everything was going well until Covid shut down.
Novi says that the last five years have been full of stress. There were a lot of people who were tired from running a restaurant during the pandemic.
This is the hardest work she has ever done in her life, she says. “Getting over the last five years has been hard; it’s been a battle!”
Novi did everything she could to keep the business going during the pandemic so she could take care of her employees and their families. She really believed in parklets and built one of the first ones with a cover for bad weather. She decorated it with holiday decorations to make all the holidays feel as happy as possible.
A frosé machine was even added. It still sits outside, calling people over like an ice cream cart and offering a frozen mix of organic rosato swirled with guava.
As early as this summer, her husband Paul Novi says, “Things just seemed to come together.” We had a stable team, and we all thought it was time to start serving lunch. It’s slowly getting out.
Reopening for lunch is a big step toward “normal,” whatever that word means these days. For lunch, you can get wood-fired pizzas, salads, paninis, and specialty pastas. They can cook steaks, fish, veggies, chicken, pork, bread, and pies in the wood-fired oven. For dinner not long ago, there was fried delicata squash on top of wood-fired fish with a lemon butter cream sauce, kale, and Brussels sprouts.
The butternut squash soup with pepitas is great for the cool fall weather. A “normal” Caesar salad, an apple pecan salad with butter lettuce, baby kale, honey crisp apples, candied pecans, goat cheese champagne vinaigrette, and fried delicata squash are all on the menu.
So is a “righteous chopped Italian salad” with romaine, arugula, and kale topped with black olives, fresh mozzarella, salami rosa, sunflower seeds, chickpeas, shaved red onion, and dressing. Another dish is a shaved fennel and kale salad with almonds, golden raisins, parmesan cheese, and green goddess sauce. It won’t cost a lot to add chicken or prawns.
Pastaria serves favorites like Mostaccioli Aurora, a filling dish with sliced Italian sausage and creamy tomato sauce, as well as walnut pesto linguine and the well-known Gnocchi Sardi, which is made with prawns, shallots, Calabrian chili sauce, and breadcrumbs.
Margherita, sausage with delicata squash and rosemary cream, and the burrata pie are some of the pizzas they serve. The burrata pie has mozzarella curd, spicy schiacciata salami, lettuce, burrata, chile oil, and a drizzle of local honey. On the menu, you can also find an apple gorgonzola pizza sandwich with lettuce and caramelized onions.
Paul says, “Everything is made from scratch here.” “I mean everything, from our dough that rests for three days to all of our pastas and sauces.” Two of our chefs have been taught by the CIA. People want to know where we get our tiramisu. We also make that!”
Paul says Donna has a lot of fans besides her big group of fans in Los Gatos. On Santa Cruz Avenue, they now see a lot of people going by. That makes her happy, but what makes her even happier is how she encourages other people to become service professionals.
“Everyone thinks of her as their mom,” says Paul. “A lot of the women who used to work for her now have daughters who work here.” That consistency is great to see. We’re all family here.