New York, NY | Pasta Shop & Italian Market | Pasta Club Subscription

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Key Results

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• A monthly creative outlet, built into two clubs, giving Sarah a standing reason to develop new recipes she'd otherwise shelve
• Club-only recipes keep customers surprised and engaged with the brand
• Responsive, hands-on support from Table22 freed Sarah to focus on craft, not logistics

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120 years on Houston Street

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When Marcello Raffetto opened M. Raffetto & Bros. in Greenwich Village in 1906, he was making egg noodles and Genoa-style ravioli for a neighborhood that needed fresh pasta and didn't have easy ways to get it. A century and change later, his great-granddaughter Sarah Raffetto runs the shop alongside her father Andrew, cutting pasta on the same guillotine machine Marcello brought in back in 1916, on the same block, for a lot of the same families.

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That continuity is the whole point. "A core value here is being consistent and making sure that our customers are happy for decades to come," Sarah says. "We've been here for 120 years and we serve generations of families that come for Christmas, come weekly, and they want the same cheese ravioli. They want the same pesto sauce." The shop leans on the simplest, best ingredients it can find, not because it's out of ideas, but because that restraint is what's kept people coming back for generations.

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Room to play

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Running a 120-year-old institution means most of the menu isn't up for debate, and Sarah wouldn't want it to be. But she's also someone who genuinely loves dreaming up new ideas, and without a reason to act on them, those ideas tend to stay exactly where they are: in her head.

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"I love the freedom of creativity and coming up with new ideas,” Sarah says, “but it can be a little challenging if you don't have a specific reason or a purpose to do it, because you just kind of let it get onto the back burner." What Raffetto's needed was a structure, something with a deadline attached that would push years of stored-up ideas out into the world without replacing what their guests loved most.

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A pasta club with a signature

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In February 2024, Raffetto's launched a Pasta Club through Table22 - a $75-a-month delivery of fresh, handmade pasta for two, along with house sauces and extras to make dinner at home feel a little more special. Members get 10% off in-store purchases, educational content and assembly cards with every box, and rotating extras and staff favorites that Sarah pulls together herself. 

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The club gives Sarah a monthly reason to experiment, something the retail case can't always accommodate.
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"I really like to do nontraditional ingredients that add some funk and flair. You can't do that all the time and re-engineer the existing things. So how fun is it to have the perfect reason to be able to do that on a monthly basis?"

— Sarah Raffetto, COO, Raffetto's

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She treats every detail of the club as a chance to put her voice on the page, literally. She signs each menu with her own signature and writes a short newsletter to go with it. "I try to add personal touches that really emphasize the old school with a hint of new school," she says. "People will really feel that and feel that much more connected to you and your brand."

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Table22 handles the parts of running a club that aren't Sarah's expertise, managing the platform, the logistics, and even the learning curve of new tools. "Every person that I've interacted with has been so nice and so responsive, and doesn't make me feel silly when I'm trying to learn Canva for the first time," she says. "I appreciate the transparency and the communication. I don't have enough nice things to say. It's been really awesome."

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The creative feedback loop

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The clearest sign that the club is working is the feedback Sarah receives after members have taken home their box. One November, for example, Sarah turned her personal love of pecan pie into a bar dessert with an Italian twist, amaretto folded into the filling, as a Thanksgiving-inspired treat. She wasn’t sure how it would go over, but the response thrilled her.

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"Someone was like, oh my God, those things were so amazing, please sell them," she says. She had a similar moment with a tahini and date bar. "That just makes me really happy, to know that someone didn't just love it, they're like, can we eat this again? It's a very high compliment that I appreciate hearing."

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That kind of feedback loop motivates Sarah to keep creating, and gives her audience a reason to keep showing up at the counter, curious about what she'll come up with next.

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Just start

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Asked what she'd tell another operator considering a club, Sarah doesn't hesitate. "I would tell them to just do it," she says. "I get nervous sometimes waiting for perfect timing to have the perfect menu ready. But nothing is perfect. I've actually had way more success not perfecting a process and just jumping in. You learn things along the way."

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Two years into the club, that instinct keeps paying off: a new bar dessert here, a seasonal pasta shape there, each one a small, low-risk way for a 120-year-old shop to keep proving it still has plenty of new ideas in it for the generations that come next.

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Our platform, your family business. Welcome to the club.