A passion for pasta
When she was a child, making ravioli with her mother during the holidays was a tradition forged by Mari Vilardo’s Sicilian ancestry. Little did she know that one day, pasta would become her life’s work.
Vilardo is owner and pasta maker of The Chubby Cupboard, which specializes in fresh, handmade pasta and sauces. She scaled up in October 2023 from pop-up to brick-and-mortar with her Carmichael shop.
She uses family recipes for her pasta that she enjoyed in her youth. A childhood steeped in culinary tradition evolved into an adulthood inspired by a passion for food. Vilardo attended culinary school and worked in the hospitality industry for a decade before realizing her true calling laid in the fond flour-and-water memories of decades past. The maiden names of her Sicilian grandmother and great grandmother roughly translate to “chubby” and “pantry,” thus, The Chubby Cupboard name was born.
Vilardo spent time in both the Emilia-Romagna and Veneto regions of Northern Italy, diving deeply into the cultural traditions of pasta. These traditions are reflected in her current offerings, which extend beyond the basic spaghetti and penne to include lesser-known shapes, such as casarecce and campanelle. “Every region in Italy is very specific in terms of pasta,” she says, “what the base is, what’s in it, even the shape. It’s really a regional food.” Local, seasonal ingredients are the hallmark of true Italian pasta, a focus Vilardo incorporates into her products. She uses eggs from her own chickens — “The Ladies,” as she calls them — herbs from her backyard garden, vegetables from local producers, and flour from a mill in San Francisco.
“In Italy, they rely on their own produce, their own farms,” Vilardo says. “It’s truly ‘slow food.’ It’s local, regional, and seasonal. I focus on seasonality and buying locally because that’s what I learned in Italy.”
The seasonal nature of her products means she frequently changes her offerings based on what she finds at the farmers’ market. Pasta offerings may include parsley rigatoni, carrot fusilli, or lemon campanelle, with sauces like lemon zest pesto or carrot green pesto, both made with almonds. She also produces filled pastas, such as roasted red bell pepper sopressini and lemon ricotta ravioli. Vilardo stocks at least one vegan sauce and one vegan pasta each week, which she makes in the tradition of true Sicilian pasta, without eggs.
Vilardo said those who have yet to try fresh pasta are in for a treat. Unlike the dried pasta that most people are familiar with, fresh pasta has a livelier flavor.
“Fresh pasta is unlike anything you’ve ever had,” she says. “The experience of truly fresh pasta is so different than many Americans are used to.”
Pasta aficionados can even learn how to prepare a dish at one of Vilardo’s private, hands-on classes. The small-group classes allow participants to make their own pasta and sauces from scratch, then enjoy a special three-course dinner to savor the fruits of their labor.
