Chronogram - Home Cooking

Home Cooking

La Bella Pasta in Kingston

By Mala Hoffman | Photos By Megan Mcquade

It was the ravioli that brought nancy covello back to the Hudson Valley in 1986. She and her husband Dennis were living and working in New York City at the time—he as a mechanical engineer for Con Edison and she as a secretary for a bank president on Staten Island—but they were coming to the area to visit her family every weekend. "We loved it up here, and we were trying to think of ways to get up here to stay," Covello recalls.

La Bella Pasta produces 600-700 pounds of pasta a week.
Her mother had recently purchased Maria's Bazaar, an Italian gourmet deli and bakery in Woodstock, where she was renowned for the homemade pasta she would crank out of a small hand-operated machine. When presented with Covello's dilemma, her mother said, "Well, I could use some help with these raviolis."

So, after purchasing a building on Route 28 in Kingston and running a restaurant in it for a few years, Covello started La Bella Pasta, which produces and distributes fresh pasta and sauces to stores and restaurants throughout the Hudson Valley, including Cena 2000 and Il Cenacola in Newburgh, La Stazione in New Paltz, and La Florentina and Guido's in Kingston, and of course, Maria's Bazaar. "My intention was always to have a factory," Covello explains. "But first we had to keep the restaurant going to help pay the mortgage."

When they were finally ready to start, Covello and her husband drove samples around to various locations themselves. "It was mostly word of mouth," she recalls. "Then, because chefs move around a lot, when one started using our product, they would bring it to another restaurant." In addition to several restaurants in the area, the pasta is also available at Adam's Fairacre Farms, Robin's Warehouse, Wallkill View Farm, and the Hurley Ridge Market, among others.

The factory is located in the basement of the building, which also houses a beer distributor and Catskill Mountain Coffee. Covello notes that the equipment, which includes a large pasta-making machine, a ravioli machine, a tortellini maker, and several pasta cutters, was purchased in Italy and then shipped back to the United States. Her mother's original ravioli machine is there too, now used as an extruder, to make pasta shapes that are not flat, such as spaghetti.

Nancy Covello stands in the doorway of La Bella Pasta's retail store on Route 28 between Kingston & Woodstock.

The company produces 600 to 700 pounds of pasta a week, which is distributed to the nearly 100 accounts and sold in the factory's retail store upstairs. "Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays we make the pasta, and Thursdays and Fridays we deliver it," Covello explains. Although the original ravioli ricotta cheese filling was developed by her maternal grandmother, Covello also offers about 20 other types, including Smoked Salmon and Cheese, Sundried Tomato, Porcini Mushroom, and Lobster. "The fillings are what people like and have requested," she adds. "We make five-pound boxes for restaurants, and they might say, can you make this or that kind, so I'll try that."

The sauces, ranging from Roasted Red Pepper to Pesto to Vegetable Marinara, are made by Covello herself in the store's kitchen upstairs, generally on Mondays. The retail store also sells jarred and canned specialty items, pizza dough, and bulk quantities of ricotta cheese.

Though it has grown over the years, the business still retains its homemade feeling. In addition to Covello, there are three other employees, one of whom has been with her for 15 years. Five years ago, her husband left the operation to take on a position with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, but he is still the official handyman. "My husband can fix anything. These machines we got from Italy, he's taken them apart and rebuilt them so that they work even better than they did originally," Covello notes.

For Covello, the scale of the business has just the right flavor. "I really love it," she admits. "I never left my kids. When they were younger, they would come in with me; I had a crib in here. When they went to school, I could be there for them. I'm so lucky that I never miss a practice, a game. I get to always be there." Though there have been suggestions that she could expand her horizons, Covello has always turned them down. "I could be a lot busier and I could be making a lot more money, but I don't care," she emphasizes. "As long as I can pay the bills, I've got food, I've got a little extra, I'm fine."

La Bella Pasta is located on Route 28 West in Kingston. The retail store is open Monday to Friday from 10am to 6pm and on Saturday from 11am to 3pm. For more information, call (845) 331-9130 or visit the Web site at www.labellapasta.com.

Family Style

Though she has since redefined ravioli for her company, La Bella Pasta, Nancy Covello credits her grandmother, Elizabetha Bordi, with the original filling recipe. Bordi, who came from the northern Italian region of Parma, moved to New York City and made a Greenwich Village apartment her home.

"When I think about it now, the apartment was so small, there wasn't a real bathroom, just a toilet, and the bathtub was in the kitchen," Covello recalls. "The apartment was so small that she would lay clean sheets on the beds, and lay out all of the sheets of pasta on the bed to dry."

Still, every Sunday, all of the family members would gather there.

Covello would come with her parents from the Bronx, where they lived when she was a child before moving to the Hudson Valley, and all of her cousins would come as well. "We would all be in the living room, and it was so comfortable and it seemed like so much room," she adds.

Covello thinks about that heritage in terms of her own children, one of whom has started working in the store during school holidays. "My children are full, all Italian," Covello adds. "When they do a family tree at school, there is nothing there but Italy."

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