Freshly-Made Pasta Shop Comes to Westlake

Italian pasta shop La Dolda will soon offer fresh and dried genuine Italian pastas and sauces made in-house daily, found up in Westlake starting on Monday, May 22. Inspired by traditional pasta shops in Italy, owner/chef, the Italian-born Westlake resident Matteo Gallizio is aiming to offer a high quality meal solutions for busy families like his own.

The fourth-generation Italian food industry veteran named the shop La Dolda after his family’s home in northern Italy where his mother would go each summer and make fresh pasta daily with her grandmother and other women in her family. The shop and Gallizio’s determination to make authentic high quality Italian pasta driven by this tradition.

The pasta is sold by weight meaning customers can buy as much or as little they need from the display case. Fresh, filled pasta stuffed with meat, cheese, vegetables, and dry pasta will be available for takeout, or customers can pay a small service fee to have the fresh pasta quickly cooked and then dine in at one of the handful of tables in the shop. (In this case, the pasta will be weighed before it is cooked.)

“We are going to use the best that nature really has to offer,” Gallizio said, which means organic flour imported from Italy, “because if you want to do the pasta, you’ve got to do it with the right flour,” said Gallizio. Other ingredients imported from Italy include canned tomatoes and Benza Olive Oil from a small batch producer in Northern Italy near Gallizio’s hometown that’s been in business since 1853. Everything else is locally sourced when possible.

The menu of fresh pasta will include signature options available every day, rotating specials, and seasonal additions such as ravioli with lobster during the winter holidays and pumpkin ravioli in the fall. The dried pastas — also made in-house — are a labor of love taking nearly a day and a half to make. Gallizio is hoping to add meatballs to the menu soon too.

Dried pastas will include ravioli (with fillings ranging from spinach, Mediterranean vegetables, cheese, pecans, to meat), tortellini, and gnocchi. Fresh ones range from spaghetti, bucatini, fettuccine, penne, to trottole. The later will rotate daily. Available sauces will always include basil pesto, meat sauce, afredo, and others, along with specials like fish sauce or carbonara.

In addition to the fresh and dry pastas, La Dolda also offers a small but highly curated selection of retail items that relate to pasta including truffle olive oil, butter and salt, and both the Italian organic flour and olive oil used to make the shop’s own pastas.

Once open, the shop will be open 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily.

• La Dolda [Official]