Pasta Pizzaz
On a Wednesday at noon, in a warehouse tucked away in an unassuming business park, Cathy weighs a 5-pound bag of freshly made spaghetti. Next to her, Barry, her current right-hand, sprinkles cornmeal into another bag of spaghetti to prevent the pasta from sticking. Hits from the ’80s, ‘90s, and ‘00s play from a speaker as they work diligently. They’ve been making pasta all morning, with over a dozen bags of spaghetti on the table. By 4 p.m., Cathy and Barry will each drive a separate route to hand-deliver pasta to restaurants across the metro; much of it will be served later that evening for dinner.
If you’ve eaten pasta from a local restaurant in Oklahoma City or Norman, it’s likely you’ve eaten fresh pasta from Pasta Pizzaz without knowing it. Owner Cathy Knobbe-Durr likes to keep it this way. Relying on word of mouth, her wholesale business is an inside secret among chefs and restaurant industry folks. Some customers are weekly regulars, others make occasional requests, but the list is long. To name a few, Gaberino’s Homestyle Italian, Victoria’s Pasta Shop, Sergio’s Italian Bistro, Bad Nonna’s Pasta, Stella Modern Italian Cuisine, FRIDA Southwest, Black Walnut, and Picasso Café are a handful of the restaurants who order fresh pasta from Pasta Pizzaz.
“If we go out to eat, we go to the restaurants that are our customers. And I treat my customers like they’re my friends,” Cathy says.
Cathy understands her customer base deeply because before Pasta Pizzaz was a wholesaler, it was a restaurant. In 1982, Cathy, her late husband Robert (known as “Pasta Bob”), and a business partner opened their restaurant at 6900 N. May Ave. They made their pasta from scratch in an open kitchen behind a plexiglass window, allowing diners to witness a process that was largely uncommon for OKC restaurants at the time.
“We were the best known secret in OKC,” Cathy reminisces. Folks from other restaurants started coming in and requesting fresh pasta for their restaurants. As word spread, they had enough sales to close the restaurant and move their equipment to a warehouse, sustaining their business by word of mouth.
Today, that’s still how they operate. “Chefs are nomads,” Cathy says. When a chef moves on to another restaurant, they might bring Pasta Pizzaz with them, and then that restaurant becomes a new customer. It’s a business model that relies on restaurateurs to spread the word. There’s a reason Pasta Pizzaz doesn’t advertise: With just Cathy and Barry, there’s only so much pasta they can make and deliver in a day.
Originally a bookkeeper by trade, Cathy slowly got into the business when her late husband Robert became ill, and he taught her the ropes in case something were to happen to him. They ran Pasta Pizzaz together for another 20 years until 2005, when he passed away. Since then, she’s been building the wholesale business by herself.
Her business model is straightforward and a little bit old-school. Customers can either send a text message or leave a voicemail with their pasta order. Each morning, Cathy hits play on the answering machine and writes down the requests in a thick spiral notebook, which she calls “the brain” of the business. One order might be 15 pounds of fettuccine, another might be 30 pounds of angel hair. After adding up the sales, she knows how much pasta she needs to make for the day. Then she begins making the first 100-pound batch of pasta dough in the hopper machine.
Once the dough is created in the hopper, it has two routes. It can go through the cutter machine, which cuts flat pasta like spaghetti, fettuccini, linguini, angel hair, pappardelle, and lasagna sheets. Or it can go through the extruder machine, which makes shapes like riga-toni, shells, macaroni, fusilli, bucatini, ziti, campanelle, and cavatappi.
The Pasta Pizzaz pasta machines are rare relics of the past that are more reliable than most newer equipment, Cathy says. Purchased back in Cathy and Robert’s restaurant days, the Italian-made analog equipment was brought to Argentina by Italians around World War II. Allegedly, the set is one of only three that remain in the world. It’s easy to believe it — the sheeter, one of the larger machines made with wood, resembles a printing press. These pasta machines allow Cathy to make dozens of pounds of fresh pasta from scratch daily. In August 2024, her top pasta sales included 600 pounds of rigatoni, 1,100 pounds of spaghetti, and 1,300 pounds of fettuccine.
With one twirled bite of Pasta Pizzaz spaghetti, you’ll taste the fresh Oklahoma difference. Most Italian pasta is made with 100% semolina flour, which is known for its nutty flavor; Cathy cuts her semolina flour with a little white flour to neutralize it and accommodate the Oklahoma palate.
Through the combined power of flour, water, and eggs, Cathy helps local restaurants, one pasta order at a time. “I like to see the restaurants succeed,” she says. “I feel like I’m that part of the restaurant. I help them put good product on the table.”
