Made in Connecticut: Durante’s Pasta
Angelo hopes the next generation will carry the business forward — making pasta just the way Durante’s customers have always liked it.
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“This is the famous marinara sauce we’ve been making for 40 years. This is your mom… This is my mother’s recipe.”
At Durante’s in West Haven, pasta and sauce are a family affair. “My mother and father, Amadeo and Carmelina Durante, started this business in 1986. So we’ve been making pasta for four decades. My mom says she used to put us on some of the flour bags to nap when we were little kids. So you can imagine how sentimental this place is to me.”
Angelo now runs the company. “We use an old technique, where you’re rolling out the dough and pressing it together so that you always get, like, an authentic bite on your pasta. That’s really what makes us unique here.”
“We’re using fresh ricotta cheese. We’re adding fresh grated Parmesan and Romano. And you could see they’re stuffed really nice. So you get a good bite out of every ravioli. We try to use the best local ingredients. And we take our time and we stick to tradition.”
“The tradition [is] making artisanal pastas with more modern equipment. We used to do this by hand. And now we’ve automated to this. Oh, this should [be a] hand crank, right? And we do about 1,000 pounds of dry pasta in a week. Air-dried the old-fashioned way.”
Angelo hopes the next generation will carry the business forward — making pasta just the way Durante’s customers have always liked it.
“It’s very close to our heart. As Italians, we love, obviously, eating pasta, pizza. But the pasta is a symbol of sitting with a family member and creating an experience.”
