By Mariya Karimjee
Anthony Ajello, the son who chose not to leave, points to the ravioli machine in his family’s pasta factory. It is big, silver and loud. “Right here,” he says, oblivious to the din, “we’re making ravioli.” The machine spits out conjoined rows of large round ravioli while emiting a whirr, and a clunk. As the ravioli appears, a gloved man grabs. Women pull it apart and separate it out into boxes.
Ajello, who is 33, continues talking about the machine. His right hand pats the top as he says, “This machine is about 30 years old, the design is even older.” The machine, which sits in the back of Pastosa Ravioli, is set to make 5000 ravioli an hour.
The grandson of Anthony G. Ajello, the founder of Pastosa Ravioli, Ajello’s been working at Pastosa all his life. He can remember being six years old and holding the door open for customers and helping them take their bags to the car. Even when he was that young he was fascinated with all of the machinery. Though he could barely see over the counter tops, it was those childhood trips to the store that piqued his curiosity about the family business. Ajello spent a year at Fordham after graduating from high school, but the year was enough. He returned to working at Pastosa with his father. He has been there ever since.
Ajello’s two siblings, brother Joseph, and sister Jacqueline, have since joined him at Pastosa. But unlike Anthony, each took a long road back to the family business.
“We all love what we do,” Anthony says. “Waking up in the morning it’s not a battle for me to come work. My brother, my sister, my father — we all love coming to work.”
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Making ravioli is like making a sandwich. “I’ve got dough in the front hopper,” Anthony says, “dough in the rear hopper, and a cheese mixture in the middle hopper.” He points to the hoppers, three compartments on the machine. The cheese is a blend of ricotta and romano. The cheese, parsley and egg meet in the dough in the middle and are rolled out to form the ravioli. But it’s the cheese that led to creation of Pastosa Ravioli.
In the 1950s and 60s, Anthony’s grandfather and namesake, Anthony G. Ajello, was a salesman for the Polly-O Italian Cheese Company. As he drove around the Italian neighborhoods of New York City, selling Polly-O’s cheeses, he saw that hardly any of the ravioli manufacturers were using what he regarded as the highest quality ricotta for their ravioli. It was only after Polly-O lost one of its biggest accounts, a pasta company that opted to use what he regarded as a ricotta of lesser quality for their ravioli, that he decided to strike out on his own and open his own store.
That store, on Avenue N and East 53rd Street in Mill Basin, was so successful that the elder Ajello was able to open a second one on Avenue U and 86th Street in Bensonhurst. In 1972, he and his son Michael opened a third store on New Utrecht Avenue and 76th Street. It is now the flagship of the Pastosa Ravioli empire.
Today there are 11 Pastosa Ravioli stores. While the Ajello family does not own all of them, they are all licensed to use the Pastosa name, and all carry fresh pasta made at the New Utrecht Avenue store.
“No one else has these kind of machines,” says Anthony, gesturing to the extruder and dyes that make the 50 types of fresh pasta that all Pastosa stores carry.
In a room on the second floor of the New Utrecht Avenue store sits Anthony’s brother, Joseph. Joseph is not Anthony, who began working at the store full-time since he was 18. Joseph has been working at Pastosa full time for two-and-a-half years. When Joseph speaks about Pastosa Ravioli, every word sounds like a sales pitch. He uses words like cost prohibitive, e-commerce, and profit margins.
He outlines the business’ expansion from a neighborhood store into a wholesale production. He talks about the line of canned tomatoes that are imported from Italy bearing the Pastosa Ravioli brand name. Then he talks about the family’s venture into prepackaged meals that busy families can buy to reheat quickly. Instant, authentic Italian cuisine.
Joseph explains that when Pastosa Ravioli first opened, it offered Brooklyn’s Italian immigrants the kind of ravioli their grandparents ate. “In the Italian culture the family meal is essentially where issues were resolved,” he says. “A lot of the time it was the only place the family could be together for any set amount of time.” But Joseph saw that unlike his grandfather’s generation, his contemporaries were not spending nearly as much time at the family meal. “If they’re not setting aside as much time to share that meal,” he asks, “does your product become less important to them?”
Joseph studied English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. As he speaks about the campus as an oasis in an industrial city, Joseph relaxes into his chair and twists the wedding band on his finger. He spent a year abroad at Oxford, working on his thesis about Shakespeare’s influence on the poets of the Romantic era. It was while defending the ideas in his thesis that several people suggested to Joseph that he should consider becoming a lawyer.
“I thought about becoming a teacher,” he says. “But I didn’t have the guts to do it. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to support the lifestyle that I wanted for myself if I became a teacher.” Instead, he enrolled at Brooklyn Law School at night and worked at Pastosa during the day. After graduating from law school, Joseph worked as an attorney for two years before returning to the family business. He says that he always knew that he was going to circle back to the family business, using both his undergraduate education and his law degree to move the family business forward.
“Anthony,” he says of his brother, “knew at a much earlier stage that this is what he wanted for his life.”
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In the office, all is quiet except for the occasional intercom from downstairs. Below, the pasta machines churn along.
“We don’t have any waste here,” Anthony says as he explains how the leftover ravioli dough is mixed with ricotta to make ricotta cavatelli. The pasta is tiny and curls into itself. Anthony takes two long strides to a drying rack where cavatelli is sitting on trays with large fans. He pulls out a tray and feels the pasta. It’s too wet. He pulls another tray, feels the pasta again. The pasta feels like the pasta in the grocery stores boxes, but it doesn’t smell the same. It smells like cheesy bread.
Anthony is unable to stay in one place too long, he walks into another part of the store where his sister, Jacqueline is packing a box of ravioli. “Where’s this box going Jacqu?” he asks.
“South Carolina,” she replies.
The Ajello’s sister, Jacqueline Fury, is the business’ shipping manager. She stands holding a box that will be in Hilton Head the next morning, her long dark hair piled atop her head. She’s been at Pastosa for the five years.
After graduating from Wagner College, in Staten Island , where she majored in arts administration, Jacqueline worked in the business side of the music industry. Of the three siblings she’s the most private. She says little about herself.
Like Joseph, she too eventually returned to the family business, and now works there full time.
She has brought her artistic sensibility and flair to the business. She’s added, for instance, a fabric leaf of fall foliage and a parmesan chunking knife to the box. She also adds a recipe, one of her mother’s. She explains that over the last few years, the business has slowly changed the Pastosa logo, which hadn’t changed since her grandfather opened the store. The new logo, which is almost identical to the original, pops off the business card she holds up. Her brother Joseph says she has been instrumental in helping organize the business, and making the company e-commerce friendly. In the last few years, Pastosa Ravioli has begun selling all over the United States.
The Ajello’s grandfather remains involved in the business. Joseph explains that while he’s retired, he was the driving force behind their wholesale line being sold in Florida, where he spends the colder months.
“Expansion is on the horizon,” Anthony says, “We’ve got to keep the product as consistent as it’s always been.” He pauses in the middle of the store and the pasta machines whirr and clank around him.
“I’ve got a three year old child that comes in here now,” he says. “She always wants to come to Pastosa, just like I used to. I bring her out to the front, she sees the customers and says, this is my store.” With that Anthony Ajello laughs.
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