Why New York is doing pasta right

Steve Gonzalez and Scott Ketchum
Sfoglini
Brooklyn, N.Y.

Brooklyn is the American adoptive mother of pasta — seriously. Antoine Zerega opened the country’s first pasta factory (which was powered by one horse!) in New York’s hippest borough in 1848. Now, Gonzalez and Ketchum are running their own small-scale pasta operation out of the former Pfizer factory in Williamsburg.

Why we chose this pasta:

Gonzalez doesn’t see using local and organic sources as a marketing ploy. “We don’t really brag that much about it, because we really just feel that’s just the way it should be done,” he says. Gonzalez and Ketchum first started getting their flour from an organic mill in North Dakota, but they’ve since started doing pasta with blended flours, incorporating locally grown, organic grains.

On staying small:

“Some people have approached us about giving us money, and the first thing they want to do is tell us how to scale up and cut costs, [which] means getting cheaper flour,” says Gonzalez. “I just don’t want to buy it. I don’t care about the extra 5, 10 percent to the bottom line. We want to use a good product, and we want to have a good product.”