For Leah Ferrazzani, pasta has always been about connection. After years building Semolina Artisanal Pasta into a widely distributed dried pasta brand, she reintroduced the business in 2024 as Ferrazzani’s Pasta & Market and shifted the focus from wholesale growth to serving her Pasadena/Altadena community directly. Just months later, the tragic Eaton Fire put that philosophy to the test.
Ferrazzani spoke with me for Appetito about identity, resilience, and why feeding people still matters more to her than building a large-scale business.
How do you describe yourself?
I’m Leah Ferrazzani, owner of Ferrazzani’s Pasta & Market in Pasadena, California, on the Altadena border. We’re the newest iteration of Semolina Artisanal Pasta, the dried pasta brand and shop I launched in 2014. In 2024, on our 10-year anniversary, we rebranded with our family name and evolved into something more personal.
What’s your Italian connection?
I grew up on a block in Holbrook, Long Island, where pretty much everyone was Italian except for me. I wanted to be Italian since I was five, inspired entirely by the food. I’m what I call an I.B.M.—Italian By Marriage—and I proudly celebrate a culture that means a lot to me.
I believe in what makes Italian culture and food special and lean into that to share with people. It reminds me a lot of the Jewish culture I was raised in, where every celebration revolved around gathering, eating, and nurturing one another through food.
What inspired you to start making pasta?
Connection. I realized my way of being in the world is using food to connect with people and build relationships. For years, I wrote about food as a journalist, but eventually wanted to become someone who made the food instead of only telling the stories of the people who did. So, I started a dried pasta company, Semolina Artisanal Pasta.
Why pasta?
I also couldn’t understand why so much great dried pasta was imported from Italy when we grow incredible durum wheat here in the United States and export half of it to Italy. The most Italian thing I could think to do was find the best ingredients in my backyard and make pasta the old-fashioned way.
How did you learn to make dried pasta?
Through a lot of trial and error. I built my own pasta dryer with a Vicks vaporizer, an egg incubator, a hydrostat, a computer fan in the window, and strategically placed box fans. I’ve always had an experimenter’s heart and wasn’t afraid to fail. I just kept trying.
I had this whole treasure trove of industry people who wanted to help me—including a university cereal sciences professor and an Italian pasta technologist I communicated with through Google Translate. I took their belief in me to heart and used it as the wind at my back and got my pasta into major stores like Whole Foods, Bristol Farms, and gourmet markets.
At what point did your vision for the business change?
After about 10 years, I realized I didn’t want to scale the business and produce a million pounds of pasta a year—I wanted to feed people.
There’s a disconnect that can happen when you lose sight of the people on the other end of what you’re making. COVID really reinforced how much direct connection mattered to me, so I started moving away from wholesale growth and focusing more intentionally on the neighborhood shop.
In February 2024, we fully rebranded and relaunched as Ferrazzani’s Pasta & Market to showcase all the specialty foods we made—fresh pasta, lasagna, panini, and dolci. It felt like the beginning of an exciting new chapter.
What happened to challenge that?
The catastrophic Eaton Fire broke out in Altadena on January 7, 2025. I closed the shop and started messaging customers asking if they evacuated and had somewhere safe to go. I reached out to anyone I knew in Altadena.
After the worst of the devastation, one of my customers sent me a video message while driving through the burning neighborhood, everything ablaze. In the video, he tells his wife, “Let’s go see if Ferrazzani’s is still there.” Then I heard her start sobbing and say, “Oh my God, they’re still standing. We have to tell Leah.”
The emotional weight of feeling you built something that anyone would give a crap about in that moment was one of the most powerful feelings I’ve ever felt.
How did you respond after the fire?
It became a huge motivating force for me. I kept thinking: how do I repay this gift? How do I take care of the people who care enough to make that phone call?
In the days afterward, we made panini for evacuees, donated food to first responders, and hosted a big pasta e fagioli gathering for our Pasta Club members because people needed somewhere to come together.
Everything became about finding ways to support the community within my means and capacity.
What do you hope people feel when they walk into your shop?
I want people to feel cared for. So much of what I try to do is rooted in finding ways to feed my neighbors and show a little love. I’m committed to being here for the long haul and being a place that’s part of people’s memories.
My hope is that when people eventually return to their homes and drive through the neighborhood, they’ll look over and say, “There’s Ferrazzani’s. Still here.”
Ferrazzani’s Pasta & Market ships its dried pasta nationwide through its website, while the Pasadena shop offers fresh pasta, prepared foods, sandwiches, and specialty Italian goods for local customers. https://ferrazzanis.com
