When chef Anthony Strong wanted to open a third location of his popular restaurant and market, Pasta Supply Co., he decided to do things differently. First, there’s the space he picked: a former Peet’s Coffee location in his neighborhood of Cole Valley.
It’s not your typical restaurant, but it was suitable enough for cooking and selling pasta at the scale Pasta Supply Co. executes at its other locations — pasta dishes cooked to order for in-house diners, or fresh pasta and sauces to cook at home.
He also decided to go a different route with getting money for the buildout. Rather than bank loans, private equity, or traditional crowdfunding sites, which he’s used in the past (“where for $50 you might get a t-shirt in a year if we get open,” he says), he knew he wanted to get the neighborhood involved. To raise $400,000 for the buildout, on Wednesday, August 12, Strong and his team set up a way for people to back them via the restaurant’s website, where they get something out of the deal, too: Purchase take-home pasta for a year for $550, or buy pasta for life for $4,000. “Why wouldn’t we go straight to the people who are already buying our pasta?” Strong says. “The people that we see at the farmers market every Sunday, the dude who stops for sandwiches and lunch three times a week in the Mission — let’s go straight to our community that we serve, [people] that trust us, that rely on us, that we already rely on, and just pay them back in pasta with our product. It was kind of ‘duh’ for me.”
Now a week into the sales, Pasta Supply Co. is “well past halfway to our target,” he says. The fine details for the pasta-for-a-year (or life) offering work out to customers being allowed to pick up a box of pasta weekly for their purchased time period, including fresh and filled pasta (just not the ready-to-bake lasagnas). Customers can start their purchases immediately and pick up their pasta at the Mission or Richmond location, or wait for the Cole Valley shop to open up, their choice. And companies can also get in on pasta purchases for employees: For every 10 subscriptions they buy, Pasta Supply Co. will donate one to a San Francisco school, which they can in turn use for fundraising or however they want. And because the purchases are made through the store’s own platform, they don’t have to pay a cut to a crowdfunding site. “For us, it just means we get to pay people back in pasta,” Strong says, “and we get to start off in a much better position as a business, with less risk, in a way that we can keep taking really good care of our team and in a way that we can grow organically.”
In setting up the crowdfunding options, Strong used tools to forecast the numbers and put that up against his costs to balance price and value, while still earning enough to reach the goal. While he doesn’t believe their brand of crowdfunding will work for all restaurants, he does think it could be a potential model for a place like, say, a bakery. “I really think it’s worth figuring out what value you can provide,” Strong says. “Ours just happens to be really easy: It’s pasta.”
There are also questions about the limitations of the pasta for the year, or for life, of course. Customers can skip a week, or get “skipsies,” as Strong calls it. No, you can’t collect a month’s worth of pasta in one visit. (Someone has already asked.) And if you’re industrious enough and deep-pocketed enough, you could follow in the footsteps of one parent who purchased a pasta-for-life option and put it in their kid’s name; Strong won’t stop you just because he didn’t put in an age restriction. (“We didn’t spell it out,” he says of the situation, laughing. “Yeah, girl, set them up. I respect that. It’s his money, right?”)
There have been some good surprises for the team in the ensuing week since customers activated their purchases. The program they vibe coded to keep track of pasta pickups includes a photo of the customer who’ll be dropping by for pasta, and Strong says it’s been “so sweet” looking at all of his smiling customers holding a box of pasta for their first pickup. “Seeing it pop as hard as it did, immediately, was pretty cool,” Strong says. “It kind of reinvigorated my faith that people are into doing cool shit for the businesses that they love and the businesses that are literally here to just make them good stuff.”
Having customers support the shop and come in weekly for their box of pasta creates the kind of community and neighborhood feel that Strong wants with his shops. The byproduct being that these customers in turn become regulars, and the team gets a fun, weekly interaction with their supporters. It’s this earnestness and straightforwardness with which Strong is hoping his shops become neighborhood staples. When he opened his first shop in the pandemic, Strong remembers moments where he wished there was some sort of neighborhood activation with the stores to get people outdoors again. He loves that a couple who lives three blocks away from his store gets to walk over once a week for pasta. He wants “any opportunity that a small independent business can take to reinforce the value of a neighborhood community,” Strong says. “We can’t exactly give DoorDash and Uber Eats a run for their money, right? But damn it, little shops like ours that are doing things like this are what create neighborhood energy.”
Pasta Supply Co. (919 Cole Street, San Francisco) debuts its Cole Valley Shop in Fall 2026.
