Most takeaway pasta joints close by 9pm. Pasta Prego throws parties that run until 2am—in a space barely big enough to turn around in.
“We just thought, oh well, let’s just give that to our staff and our customers,” says Lorenzo Fantarella, who co-founded the Melbourne Chapel Street shop with Isaac Varano. “We just put ourselves in their shoes. It makes our lives easier to make decisions.”
The parties aren’t a gimmick. They’re an extension of a carefully cultivated brand identity that has employees so bought in, one got a Pasta Prego tattoo. (The promise of free pasta for life helped.)
Location, location, vibe
Pasta Prego sits on Chapel Street, surrounded by nightclubs. Fantarella and Varano, both in their twenties, recognized the opportunity immediately. Their staff skews young. Their price point—around $15—targets the same crowd heading to clubs.
“Our brand is online and the tone that we deliver to our customers is very house music, you know, party fun night kind of thing,” explains Fantarella. “That’s what we wanted as customers, to go into a takeaway place and have a bit of fun. There’s good music on.”
The parties became a logical extension. “We’re not doing a 5am Pilates class in our store,” Fantarella laughs. “We’re doing an 11 to 2am party with free Red Bull.”
The cram session
During events, the founders open up the kitchen and pack roughly 100 people into their small space. It’s chaotic, sweaty, and exactly what they’re going for.
“Lorenzo and I kind of don’t really take ourselves that seriously,” says Varano. “We just love to have fun. We’ve tried to create a vibe in the shop with our staff where everyone works hard, but you also have a lot of fun.”
The staff, he notes, “actually do really appreciate it and get around it.” Customers get to see behind the scenes. The team feels valued. And the brand reinforces its personality in a way that social media posts alone can’t achieve.
“It’s more so just us expressing our personalities through our brand and building our brand,” Varano adds.
Work hard, play hard—actually
The party culture isn’t just about fun. It’s rooted in Fantarella and Varano’s core operating principle: work hard, play hard. In that order.
“The first thing is work hard,” emphasizes Fantarella. “Our staff know from the get go, hey, there’s hospitality jobs, there’s retail jobs. The retail jobs are going to be easier. They’re not going to be as rewarding, and they’re not going to be as much fun, because we’re going to work hard, but then we’re going to have our time to unwind and talk a bit in the kitchen and muck around a little bit.”
The approach shapes their hiring philosophy entirely. “We don’t hire anyone who can train cook,” Fantarella explains. “We hire based on personality and how we think they’re going to fit with the team, and we just plan on training them ourselves.”
It’s worked. Beyond the tattooed employee, the founders note their team genuinely enjoys coming to work. As they’ve stepped back and promoted managers, they’ve found people love the additional responsibility.
“They feel extra fulfilled with their job,” says Varano. “They feel proud of their work, and they enjoy coming back to do it because they just enjoy it.”
The brand alignment
The parties aren’t an add-on—they’re brand alignment. Everything from the music selection in-store to the tone of their social media content reflects the same late-night, high-energy aesthetic.
“That might help out—there’s also nightclubs across the road and all up and down the street,” notes Fantarella. “So our biggest thing is our staff are also around our age and younger. They really do appreciate this sort of vibe.”
It’s a reminder that for Gen Z entrepreneurs, brand building isn’t about focus groups or marketing consultants. It’s about creating the experience they themselves would want as customers, then finding staff and customers who want the same thing.
“That’s who we are,” says Fantarella simply. “It’s an extension of our brand, really.”
And if that means cramming 100 people into a tiny pasta shop at midnight with house music pumping and free Red Bull flowing? So be it. That’s just business—Pasta Prego style.
This conversation took place at Fine Food in Sydney as part of its live talks series.
