Mark Troiano ’15 didn’t know what he was getting into.
He had volunteered to help me prepare pasta for the Denver farmers’ markets on Saturday. What he got was a slice of the 17-hour grind that had been my routine since I opened Cuoco Fresh Pasta months earlier.
He joined me in my rented kitchen space that Friday night at 10 p.m. We emerged at 6 a.m. the next morning for our first break.
In the hours between we ran dough through a large extruder, nested the pasta with a generous handful of semolina, weighed and packaged it for sale, loaded all of it up in coolers, then mopped and cleaned to return the shine to the stainless kitchen surfaces.
Then we headed to the Saturday market for a full day of sales, the pay-off for these marathon kitchen sessions. Mark said he wanted to experience what it was like to own his own small business. I still don’t know if the experience inspired him or turned him away.
Mark was one of 13 Wabash students in the College’s Professional Immersion Experience who spent four days visiting alumni in Colorado last fall. They met leaders in the tech industry, manufacturing, adventure sports, and me, the owner and sole employee of a fledgling business with a growing customer base. At a local pizzeria I put this question to them: “Who among us wants to work all-nighters, borrow money against his future, and work seven days a week for the potential of making, at best, a nominal living?”
At the time, I was posing the same question to myself.
Launching Cuoco Fresh Pasta was a project I’d dreamed about for years. Just 18 months earlier, convinced it was “now or never,” I quit my job as soon as my annual bonus was deposited in my bank account. I sold my home and moved to Perugia, Italy, where I had lived periodically for five years after graduating from Wabash, helping to direct an international studies program.
This time I returned to fashion my own culinary education. I asked the best chefs in Perugia for access to their kitchens. I trained in the white-cloth Ristorante La Taverna, where I was given the nickname “cuoco,” a term of endearment for “cook.” I was the “grande cuoco,” the big cook, who somehow found himself working the frenetic line of service, missing the special instructions yelled out in rapid Italian by the maître d’, or confused by the foreign accents of kitchen workers from the Congo or Bangladesh.
I was the rookie who burned his forearm hair while constantly stirring a pan of risotto over a stove with thousands of BTUs blaring upward; the one who forgot the Italian word for “towel” just as I noticed potatoes burning in the oven. All this under the watchful eye of the chef and owner, who was featured in Bon Appétit that summer.
I also learned from a middle-aged man and his mother in their small fresh pasta “bottega” near the center of town. The storefront was so small that I would bump into Cristiano as he transferred pasta from the extruder to our workspace. Perhaps he preferred this small space, as he spent most of our production sessions shouting at passersby, occasionally joining them in the street for a cigarette. Cristiano was the one who taught me how to operate a giant extruder that would eventually become my production vehicle, but also how to fill and fold stuffed pastas. Cristiano also scolded me to put away my Moleskin notebook and iPhone camera, to learn from touch, not from documenting the experience.
In these moments I looked on a nest of fresh pappar-delle as a treat, but lusted for the hand-folded cappelletti.
It was in this Umbrian hill town during my junior semester abroad that I had first sampled “Italian food,” a descriptor I loathe. At first I turned my nose up to a black truffle, but later I learned to savor the earthy aroma and flavor with gusto. I ate many Neapolitan-style pizzas and sampled my way through each region’s version of ragu. I was beguiled by a delicious new-to-me culinary world. Ten years after that first taste, I wanted to bring part of that world to Denver.
It was just something I had to do.
After I obtained all the licenses and opened the necessary bank accounts, I had one week to prep for my first retail experience. It took a few marathon kitchen sessions with my friend, Kyle Long ’07, who flew out to Denver to assist in the final hours. We wasted many kilos of imported flour—and a case of PBR—before we got the process right. (Kyle’s high-school days working as a short-order cook at a diner in “the Region” came in handy—his rapid egg-cracking skills were essential as each failed batch went into the trash and we started anew.) We emerged from the kitchen with only a few hours to spare and celebrated over a fancy meal, without a care that we still had flour in our hair and beards.
Those carefree moments were soon a distant memory.
In the first month of selling at farmers’ markets—starting small without the overhead of a brick and mortar shop—I met new customers and produced more pasta each week.
I saw success in the smallest of gestures, felt pride in every hint of growth.
By my second month in business I was selling all that I could produce. Regular customers would arrive before the markets officially opened to stock up before I sold out, some leaving with over $100 worth of pasta for the week.
“Your ravioli is the best we’ve ever tasted. You will see us again and again this summer,” one customer wrote to me. Another emailed, “I’ve almost gone through my fortress stockpile of pasta. What will you feature this weekend?” And another customer Tweeted, “Best #fresh-pasta I have ever had!”
During high season, nothing mattered but production. Day after regimented day I either was picking up supplies, filing accounting or taxes, or working to promote the business. Each solo overnight production session was a test to become more efficient, just as I was taught in Italy—an anxious sprint to produce more than the previous day and still clean the rented kitchen by 6 a.m.
As months passed I began to wonder if the satisfaction I felt was worth the hours alone in the kitchen, the constraints of owning a business I couldn’t leave, the travel and friends I was missing.
The growth of the business made me anxious. The weekly sales didn’t worry me. Expansion strategies did. Generating a profit is not the same as generating a living. Generating a living would put more at stake. It would mean signing multi-year leases, hiring production staff, and borrowing six-figure loans.
I took a vacation at the end of market season to clear my head and visit with friends. Many were quick to remind me that “it takes three to five years” to get a business off the ground and that “half of all new businesses close.” I didn’t want to hear it.
Later, as I met with my realtor to view potential retail storefronts, I knew the numbers weren’t promising. I wasn’t sure how to sell enough dough to cover the rent, much less provide a living wage. I looked beyond Denver to smaller cities, I considered transitioning the business to a part-time operation, and I thought about jumping “all in” to start my own restaurant. No model for expansion provided a secure way of making a living. Of course, no one assumes owning a business comes with security.
In the end, the business mantra “evolve or die” became “evolve or dissolve.” Deciding to close Cuoco Fresh Pasta was perhaps the wisest business decision I ever made.
Today I help make dough of a different sort. I consult with small-business owners who share the same struggles and issues I experienced. I may assist by drafting a marketing strategy, suggesting improvements to make operations more efficient, implementing technology for their mundane tasks, or organizing their finances.
It turns out I can generate more profits by helping businesses sell their ownership stake or close than I did by running my own business.
I didn’t really know what I was getting into when I started Cuoco Fresh Pasta.
Opening a business is exhilarating; closing a business forced me to deal with conflicting emotions of pride and shame, elation and defeat. How could I claim my business venture was a success when I barely paid off my start-up costs?
Still, I consider Cuoco a successful and transformative experience. My double bottom line was showing returns in currency I couldn’t spend but could certainly keep as personal assets. I retain the work ethic developed by being the sole operator forced to create and share something directly with strangers. I retain the joy of being spotted in public by customers raving about how they served my pasta.
And I retain the knowledge that—at the very least—I pursued this venture with gusto.
After I closed the business, I spent a holiday weekend visiting with my family in the nearby mountain town of Breckenridge, CO. We were waiting to board the gondola when a young woman ripped off her ski helmet and goggles and yelled out my name. She was Jamie, one of my former customers. Two months had passed since the end of the market season, she was out of pasta, and she wanted to know where she could get more. She said her mother was also asking for the recipe for my sage walnut cream sauce.
I was glad to share it.