Marin chef to open gourmet shop in Mill Valley
Tam Valley resident and chef Tony Adams, owner of Mill Valley Pasta Co., is ready to bring a kaleidoscope of possibilities to your kitchen with this weekend’s grand opening of his new downtown Mill Valley retail shop. This is where you’ll find everything from toasted couscous pearl pasta and black truffle tomato sauce to smoked organic maple syrup and bacon pangrattato (crispy breadcrumbs).
Adams went from making fresh pasta at home for friends and neighbors during the 2020 pandemic lockdown to becoming a fixture at Bay Area farmers markets. He now produces more than 1,400 pounds of pasta in small batches weekly at the factory shop he opened in San Rafael in 2022. Pastas are slowly air-dried for six to 21 days in open racks to enhance texture, flavor and digestibility.
More than 90 bronze-cut, fresh extruded, mostly vegan varieties come in unique shapes. Flavor enhancements like saffron, porcini mushroom, squid ink, truffle and local vegetable and herb purees are sourced from the farmers markets where Adams is a vendor.
Earlier this year, Adams began using locally grown, harvested and milled heirloom wheat from Larkspur’s Honoré Farm and Mill in his plain pastas and launched the Antica line featuring the rare Hourani durum wheat.
The shop also carries a handful of rotating fresh pastas, a dozen or so sauces and specialty house-made provisions like Calabrian chili paste, preserved lemon puree drizzle and naturally fermented hot sauce. A wide variety of imported, hard-to-find provisions include bottarga (cured fish roe), cured tuna heart, Colatura di Alici (Italian fish sauce), fine Italian Venchi chocolate, tinned seafood and Italianavera sughi and affini (sauces and similar) from the San Marzano region of Italy.
From closer to home, you’ll find fresh cuts from Canteen Meats (Petaluma), Alec’s Ice Cream (Petaluma), goods from Full Belly Farm (Guinda) and dried fruit from Everything Under the Sun Farm (Winters). The lineup changes regularly and new products are introduced weekly.
Earlier this year, Mill Valley Pasta Co.’s porcini radiatore pasta won a Good Food Award from the Good Food Foundation and its popular duck egg noodles were a finalist. Both are at the shop along with a few foods from co-winning makers Adams met at the Good Food Awards mercantile held in Oregon in April — coffee from Speckled Ax Wood Coffee Roasters from Maine (Adams’ hometown), Beanstory beans from Seattle and Oakland-based Kuali, maker of artisan Mexican salsa.
A few nonfood items are also available, such as linens, cookbooks, pasta-making tools, themed stationery, cards and jewelry, and wrapping paper with Italian cookies, charcuterie and cheeses or pasta shapes.
Adams’ curation of a regularly shifting selection of unique products fuels and inspires his continued growth.
“Everyone has to cook, and as a chef, there’s something inherent inside of me that wants to have ingredients no one else has and to provide access to the less accessible,” Adams says.
He elaborates using a crayon box as an analogy for his background in food and restaurants.
“In central Florida (where he owned and operated the award-winning and much-lauded Big Wheel Provisions and the Big Wheel Mobile Food Truck in Orlando), there was a 12-crayon box of ingredients. In the farmlands of central Pennsylvania (where he was the head chef at a restaurant in Hershey), it was a 20-pack, some of which I’d never seen or heard of. … Blue raspberries are a real thing … and in California, where there are eight types of broccoli at the farmers market, it’s a 69-pack with a sharpener,” Adams says.
The chef also reflects on his teaching background. He was the director of the Cooking School at Cavallo Point Lodge in Sausalito from 2016 to 2020, and, earlier in his career, was an instructor at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Orlando for more than five years.
“The look on someone’s face who is excited about something from Italy they’ve never seen before, or who are from there but haven’t seen since they were little, is a thrill,” he says.
The 700-square-foot gourmet market was most recently Brooklyn – A Project of Chabad of Mill Valley and previously a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop for four decades.
Mill Valley Pasta Co.’s grand opening is from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday at 29 Miller Ave. in Mill Valley and includes giveaways, discounts and more. Store hours thereafter are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays.
For more information about the factory store, seven farmers market locations and other retail outlet availability, or to shop online, visit millvalleypasta.com.
Leanne Battelle is a freelance food writer and restaurant columnist. Email her at ij.lbattelle@gmail.com with news and recommendations and follow on Instagram @therealdealmarin for more on local food and updates on the launch of The Real Deal Marin restaurant search guide.