We love boiling up some fresh pasta after a long day and tossing it with some simple ingredients. And now we can do that with locally made Alfresco Pasta. Alfresco pasta is made here in Nashville in a nondescript industrial strip center with barely a sign. But inside is pasta making rivaling that in Italy.
Its founder is Chris Grissom a long-time chef and restauranteur who spent time opening restaurants in his native Mississippi and the west coast. It was there, in San Francisco where he encountered a “total Italian guy named Gabrielle” who was peddling the best pasta he had ever had.
He settled in Nashville in 1996 when there were “about 5 good restaurants in town” and worked alongside Willy Thomas at the Capital Grille in the Hermitage Hotel. All along he never forgot that incredible pasta from California. So in the spring of 2000 he opened Alfresco Pasta.
It started in a tiny 800-foot kitchen on Charlotte Pike which they outgrew quickly. The second kitchen was in the Nashville Business Incubation Program operated by TSU. The third move brought them to their current spot in the strip center off Fourth Ave. South in the Wedgewood Houston area.
What makes their pasta so good? Chris acquires it to a number of things, not the least being their Agnelli pasta machine. The Rolls Royce of pasta. It can press pasta at 2,000 pounds per square inch—that’s the pressure you need for the perfect texture. Also the ingredients, they only use Durum wheat from Montana. “It’s a summer wheat high in protein, which makes the best chewiest pasta. We don’t scrimp on that. It’s more expensive. But it’s worth it.” They are committed to using local products as well, including Delvin’s Farms Butternut Squash, Sweet Valley Farms cheese and Monterey Farms mushrooms.