Fresh faces – Baton Rouge chefs take the lead at local pasta company

By 6 a.m. most Saturdays, Daniel Thompson and Robert D’Agostino are already at work preparing one of the world’s simplest but trickiest foods. The two men, both chefs, are the new owners of the Fresina Pasta Company in Baton Rouge, a business launched in 1926 in Independence, La., by members of the Fresina family—part of the wave of Sicilian immigrants who settled in the state in the early 20th century.

Using the Fresina family’s original formula, Thompson and D’Agostino make dough of perfectly proportioned water and semolina flour and load it into a large Italian pasta machine. Interchangeable bronze dies positioned inside the machine will yield the various shapes of pasta the store sells, from fettuccine to penne. Today, the team will only produce three different long pastas—smaller, cut pastas will be made next Saturday.

As the graceful lengths of pasta are extruded from the machine, the chefs carefully cut them into even sections and suspend them on wooden drying rods. Later, the pasta is packaged by hand into the company’s oversized rectangular boxes and placed in displays in the Drusilla Shopping Center storefront. It is also sold at a growing number of retailers around town, including Matherne’s Supermarket on Highland Road and Alexander’s Highland Market. Fresina Pasta is a unique product—entirely preservative-free and made in small batches.

“I had always been a fan of Fresina pasta,” says Thompson, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. “It’s a higher-quality product, and you can taste the difference.”

The store sells 30 different pastas, including pastas cut into crawfish, alligator and tiger shapes and pastas made with whole wheat or spelt flour. For several years, DiGiuilio’s Bros. Italian Café has used Fresina’s whole wheat spaghetti on its menu.

Prior to buying the pasta company last July, Thompson and D’Agostino were working at Nottoway Plantation in White Castle. Thompson, the executive chef, and D’Agostino, sous chef, were routinely clocking 80-hour work weeks to keep up with the demands of conferences, weddings and plantation country tourists.

“At one point, I said to Robert, ‘If we’re going to work this hard, we ought to work for ourselves,'” recalls Thompson, who has two small children.

Meanwhile, D’Agostino’s father Charlie, the executive director of the Louisiana Business and Technology Center and the LSU Innovation Park, got wind of the possible sale of the Fresina Pasta Company, owned by family friends. He passed the idea along to the chefs. By July 2012, Thompson and Robert D’Agostino had purchased the pasta business and had begun developing plans for its growth.

“We’re planning to expand our retail presence,” says Thompson. “We’ve had a lot of stores want the product on their shelves, and now we’re working out ways to accommodate them.”

Because the process of making and drying pasta takes up so much room, the duo is planning to move production to an offsite, temperature-controlled warehouse. They hope to convert the current production room, adjacent to the retail shop, to an Italian deli café. The retail shop already sells Fresina red sauces, several imported cheeses, Fresina’s private label aged balsamic vinegars, selected olives, preserved garlic and the store’s own smoked Italian sausage.

Adding the café will allow them to use their chef skills in the kitchen. Among other items on the forthcoming deli menu, says Thompson, will be a hard-to-beat muffaletto.

Thompson and D’Agostino bring years of culinary experience to their current role as food entrepreneurs. Before Nottoway, Thompson worked at Commander’s Palace and the Grill Room at the Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans, and for Chef John Folse at White Oak Plantation. He is a former executive sous chef at the Baton Rouge Country Club and once worked for “Iron Chef” Roy Yamaguchi in Hawaii.

D’Agostino worked at Mansurs, Stroube’s and Nottoway and in restaurants in Oregon. His experience in the Pacific Northwest, he says, planted an appreciation for using fresh, local ingredients.

The two chefs have expanded the store’s cooking classes, which they teach themselves. A sample menu of a recent class included Parmesan and pumpkin bisque, sun-dried tomato crusted salmon with pesto gnocchi and mandarin tiramisu.