Key Results

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• Creative canvas unlocked: Time-intensive pasta shapes and allocated wines now have a home
• Team engagement: Kitchen staff collaborate on projects they're genuinely excited to make, improving morale and output quality
• Turnkey logistics: Table22 handles fulfillment, allowing the team to focus entirely on craft and storytelling

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Portland's Italian Table

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Ava Gene's has become a cornerstone of Portland's dining scene, known for its commitment to Italian tradition and exceptional hospitality. The restaurant sources from local farmers at the PSU market, works with trusted producers, and builds its reputation on the kind of food that comes from happy kitchens, where every member of the team has each other's backs.

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Chef Sam leads the pasta program with a philosophy rooted in memory and emotion. "I grew up eating a lot of pasta," he reflects. "There's so much love that goes into a bowl of noodles. It just feels really satisfying." That kind of passion extends to Ava Gene's wine program, where sommelier Beatrice curates bottles that tell unique stories, from volcanic Underwood Mountain to monastery cellars in Lazio.

But like many restaurants committed to excellence, Ava Gene's faced a familiar tension: how do you balance creative ambition with the practical demands of a busy dining room?

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The Creative Dilemma

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In the kitchen, Chef Sam and pasta maker David dreamed up shapes that pushed boundaries, like a pappardelle ripieni stuffed with caramelized onions and ricotta, folded into rosettes that take 10-15 minutes per order to craft.

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"It's a shape I like because it's really decadent to cut into it," Sam explains. "And you get this, like, really thin pasta, usually with a pretty rich filling. It's just really fun to eat."

The problem? Volume. In a busy restaurant producing hundreds of covers, there's simply no time for labor-intensive work. And Chef Sam wants to change that. "What we're working on this year is making sure we do pastas that are really fun for us in the kitchen, that we might not be able to do in the dining room," he says.

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The Wine Problem

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Meanwhile, Beatrice faced her own constraints. Working with a specifically Italian-focused wine list, she'd discover exceptional bottles that didn't quite fit the restaurant's scope-like a Ramato Pinot Grigio from Underwood Mountain, made by principled winemakers pushing American wine forward.

"I don't think that in our contexts, an Italian restaurant, there would be many opportunities to drink, you know, Ramato of Pinot Grigio," Beatrice explains. "These skin contact Pinot Grigio wines are traditional in Italy and across the Slovenian border and through most of the northern Adriatic, but one made in America? There's an argument that can be made that it belongs in an Italian restaurant, but it's not a very watertight argument."

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Then there were the allocated treasures - wines made by Cistercian nuns in Lazio, produced in such small quantities (maybe two cases per year) that they'd disappear instantly if placed on the shelf. These weren't bottles meant for speculation or markup. They were humble, farmer wines made as expressions of faith, priced fairly, and deserving of people who would truly appreciate their story.

But how do you share something rare without it vanishing to whoever happens to walk in first?

The Canvas: two clubs, unlimited creativity

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Working with Table22, Ava Gene's launched two distinct subscription clubs - one for pasta, one for wine - that became creative outlets for everything the team couldn't justify in regular service.

Pasta Club: permission to be ambitious

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The pasta club gave Sam and David permission to make what truly excited them. Each month, they collaborate with the GM on what they can source in-season, then brainstorm shapes and fillings that would be prohibitively time-consuming for nightly service.

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Take the pappardelle ripieni. To make it, you roll pasta extra-thin and extra-wide, pipe caramelized onions and ricotta down the center, seal it, cut it, fold it, seal it, roll it back into a rosette shape, then cut the top. It's an art project - impossible for a packed dining room, but perfect for a small-batch club.

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"I think it's really important that everybody in the process is involved," Sam shares. "So making sure we're all engaged and how we're going about creating these menus it's really important to me."

What makes the pasta club special is the team's expertise - laminating pastas, placing herbs individually with tweezers between sheets, coloring doughs with beet juice or green puree, really crafting shapes. And while they can't produce these labor-intensive pastas in high volumes for regular service, the club lets them create something truly special for members at home.

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Members receive complete cooking instructions, bringing restaurant-quality pasta into their homes with just a pan of salted water and gentle hands.

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Wine Club: stories without boundaries

The wine club freed Beatrice to follow her curiosity beyond Italian tradition. It became the home for what she calls "all of the things that we are most excited about, the things that feel perfect for a specific moment, even if they aren't in a broad reaching sense."

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That Underwood Mountain Pinot Grigio? It's now reaching members who appreciate the story of alpine viticulture and principled American winemaking, even if it doesn't fit neatly into an Italian restaurant's identity.

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The monastery wine made by Cistercian nuns? Instead of watching it disappear instantly, Beatrice put the allocation into the wine club with a note explaining the story: humble wines made as expressions of faith, not profit.

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The wine club has given Beatrice the ability to run a wine list that aligns with Ava Gene's values as a restaurant and as people, creating a larger conversation with their community beyond the dining room.

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The partnership difference

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Both Sam and Beatrice emphasized how Table22 made the clubs feel effortless rather than burdensome.

"It's substantially more turnkey than I could have ever expected," Beatrice shares. "A lot of people, especially people in the tech industry, like to say things about it just working. And this is one of the few that I think that that is actually true of."

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Table22 handles all logistics - billing, member communications, delivery - freeing the Ava Gene's team to focus on the creative work they love.

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"All of that logistics feels like it takes away from the actual important logistics on my part," Beatrice says. "I'm very grateful to be able to offload that onto a team of talented people."

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Building community beyond the dining room

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The clubs have become more than revenue streams. They're how Ava Gene's extends its hospitality beyond its four walls, reaching regular guests month after month with experiences they couldn't have otherwise.

Pasta club members cook restaurant-quality shapes at home with ingredients from the same trusted farms. Wine club members receive Beatrice's personal notes about volcanic terroir, monastery traditions, and American winemaking - stories that become touchstones for their own wine journeys.

"These are all the things that are. What I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about," Beatrice says.

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What's next

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Both clubs continue to evolve with the seasons and the team's creative ambitions. The formula is simple but powerful: give talented people permission to make what they truly care about, offload the logistics that would otherwise bog them down, and partner to build a community of members who genuinely appreciate the craft.

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"Happy people make happy food," Sam reminds us. With Table22 handling everything else, the Ava Gene's team gets to stay focused on what matters: cooking with love, sharing stories through wine, and creating moments of simple joy - whether around the restaurant table or in members' homes.