Sorrentino Pasta closed its Ambler restaurant and shop to pivot to wholesale
Rich Sorrentino’s semi-secret restaurant has closed as he’s doubled down on making pastas for supermarkets and other wholesale customers. Eventually, he will open a small retail shop.
Sorrentino Pasta & Provisions may have closed its Ambler restaurant and market last month, but owner Rich Sorrentino is not getting out of the pasta business. He is concentrating on the wholesale operation that had grown alongside the storefront while developing a new shop nearby.
Sorrentino’s business, which opened in 2021 on Butler Avenue near Ridge, combined a dining room, pasta workshop, and Italian specialty market in a narrow storefront next to Alice Bakery. You could walk in and buy fresh and dried pastas by the pound as well as focaccia, oils, vinegars, tinned fish, and cheeses from a small refrigerator. But insiders knew about the 15 restaurant seats under a blackboard in the front, where Sorrentino offered a changing menu of dishes such as pappardelle al cinghiale, casarecce with ’nduja, carbonara, and garganelli with pesto, pistachios, breadcrumbs, and arugula.
Wholesale pasta has been Sorrentino’s bread and butter for the last three years, especially after he acquired a small garage on a nearby side street, which he turned into a production facility. He supplies local restaurants and country clubs.
Sorrentino said the wholesale business offered greater potential than a restaurant — as well as the attraction of a Monday-through-Friday schedule.
“I can’t be in two places at once,” he said. “I weighed the options between the restaurant and the wholesale business and which one I wanted to keep going.”
Locally, pasta makers have moved in both directions as their businesses have grown. Scaramuzza’s Pasta Products closed its Clifton Heights walk-in store in 2016 to concentrate on wholesale before later restoring retail at a larger facility, while Settantatré expanded from a combined Milmont Park shop and production space into a larger Berwyn store with a separate gluten-free production facility and event space nearby.
For Sorrentino, the decision ended a five-year run for a business that grew out of his pasta-making hobby. “I come from a big Italian family,” he said. Before opening the shop, he was technical director for a large corporate chain. Given all the travel, “I found myself making pasta as a kind of relief — something therapeutic,” he said.
The hobby eventually took over a room adjoining his kitchen, and small gatherings grew into large dinner parties. “I’d always had the idea of opening a fresh pasta shop,” he said. “Going to Italy as much as I do, I’ve seen a lot of cool concepts over there, and I always thought, “Man, this would be cool to do in a town like Ambler.” He acquired the Butler Avenue building during the pandemic and decided to take the chance. He recently sold the property.
Meanwhile, the wholesale operation continues, though Sorrentino says at 1,200 square feet, he is running out of room. With the closing of the restaurant kitchen, he cannot produce and package sauces for now.
Sorrentino’s line covers both dry and fresh pastas, as well as frozen ravioli and his top seller, potato gnocchi.
The company makes private-label ravioli and gnocchi for Weavers Way, the co-op. Sorrentino products are also sold at Corner Stoop in Philadelphia, Dave’s Backyard Farm in Huntingdon Valley, Tredici Market in Wayne, Sam’s Italian Market in Willow Grove, and Skippack Italian Market. The company alternates Saturdays between the Conshohocken and East Falls Farmers Markets and sets up at Horsham’s on Sundays.
Expanding retail availability is the next step, Sorrentino said. He is building out a small shop nearby; he’s not sure of the timeline.
“We’re only now slowly getting into the retail world,” he said. “We’ve purposefully been slow about pushing that because we were trying to focus on our restaurant clients. But it’s something we’re going to focus on, now that the store is closed.”
