We hear it from restaurant owners all the time. Today, diners are looking for more than just a meal. They’re looking for an experience. Chefs like Natalia Lepore Hagan are responding to this demand with creativity, innovation, and a whole lot of fun. Natalia’s Philadelphia-based Midnight Pasta is an immersive pasta-making experience that includes music, dancing, and a world-class Italian dinner.
Natalia joined hosts Claudia Saric and Spencer Michiel on So You Want To Run a Restaurant to tell us how she came up with this unique concept and what it’s like to be a part of this awesome experience.
What Exactly is An Immersive Pasta-Making Experience?
Natalia is not only a chef and the founder of Midnight Pasta, but she’s also the teacher of an energetic, engaging, and highly interactive learning and dining experience. It’s all part of a ticketed event.
“First, we wine and dine them, then I throw them headfirst into a wild 45-minute pasta class,” Natalia explained. “Then we take the pasta that everybody's made back to the kitchen team, led by our amazing executive chef, Chelsea Krier, and we turn it into a five-course dinner party.”
And don’t worry if you’re not a night owl. Classes don’t actually start at midnight! The experience and the name are both inspired by Natalia’s Italian family. As she explained to us, “Midnight Pasta is a concept. But it's also a specific Italian dish, mostly done in Rome, but all over Italy. It's a late night snack where Italians go into their cupboard and they grab anchovies and olives and olive oil, and maybe they have parsley and garlic. And they make a pasta dish at midnight.”
Fortunately for you, Midnight Pasta actually opens the doors to its unique Culinary Collective space at 6 p.m. for its ticketed pasta-making and dining experience.
Five Takeaways From Our Chat With Natalia Lepore Hagan
This experience is designed to capture so much of what made family dinners special for Natalia as she grew up. She recalled “At Thanksgiving, if you didn't have a place to go; at Christmas, if you didn't have a place to go – we were always that family. My grandfather opened up his doors to anyone and everyone.”
Natalia’s grandfather was an artist, and he brought that sensibility to everything, including the pasta-making skills that he passed on to his granddaughter. As Natalia told us, “it was a wonderful way to grow up. People were always playing loud music and dancing. That was the kind of dinner table that I grew up around. And I really wanted other people to experience this.”
That is the ambition at the heart of Midnight Pasta. Find out exactly how Natalia recreates this experience for her guests with a look at our five favorite moments from our chat.
1. Dining with a Theatrical Flair
If you knew Natalia during her childhood in Ohio, you’d probably be surprised to find her making waves in the restaurant business. That’s because she dreamed of dancing on Broadway as a kid. In fact, she describes her 20s as a whirlwind of performances, beginning with her very first gig dancing in a four episode stretch of critically-acclaimed HBO series Boardwalk Empire. As she recalled, “by the time I was 27, I had visited or performed in almost all 50 states.”
While an immersive pasta experience may seem a long way from the theatre, Natalia brings the stage to her guests. As she warns attendees, “I'm going to be dancing around, and I'm going to ask you to dance with me.”
“I think a lot of other artists, they'll come in and they'll say, ‘I really love how you dimmed the lights in that moment, or you opened the doors like a curtain.’ It feels like you're in this immersive experience when you come in,” Natalia told us.
And that’s really the key to creating that unique and memorable moment that diners crave. As Natalia explained it, “Everything is theatrical.”
2. Tapping Into Something Deeper
During our chat, Natalia tapped into the deeper reason that so many consumers today are actively seeking out immersive dining experiences. Natalia confided in us that she has experienced grief and tragedy in her personal life. She described Midnight Pasta “as a way for me to be happy again.”
It turns out that it’s also a great way to share and spread that happiness. As Natalia told us, “When customers walk in the door, they forget about what's going on outside. They get to come in and experience joy and have a moment where they don't have to think about that,” Natalia observed. “So when I created Midnight Pasta, I didn't realize I was also doing that for myself, and I was creating a space where I could feel joy.”
“Then I started seeing other people having that same experience,” said Natalia. “People come in and say, ‘I had a really hard day,’ or ‘Something tragic happened in my life, but this gave me a lot of joy.’”
3. Going Viral
Any time you launch a new concept, there will be some growing pains. As Natalia told us, “the first event was absolute chaos. It was mostly my friends and family and two people that had just heard about it.”
But Natalia described the difference between then and now as night and day. And she also shared that the big break for Midnight Pasta came courtesy of a popular local influencer named Josh Eats Philly. Natalia acknowledged that some chefs and restaurant operators may be resistant to the idea of bringing in an influencer. For her business, however, it proved the perfect marketing strategy.
“Josh had a great time. He also had a lot of really good constructive feedback for me, and we really hit it off,” Natalia told us. “Then he posted one reel, it started going viral, and we started gaining thousands of followers, and all of our classes sold out. That’s when I realized we actually have something that people really want. There's a hole in the market, and we're tapping right into it.”
4. Creating a Shared Experience
There’s one thing you should know about Midnight Pasta. If you are the shy type, you will be forced out of your shell. As Natalia told us, “We design it specifically so that not every single person has every single tool available to them…So you have to run across the room with your eggshell and find someone who has a bowl, or you have to say to your next-door neighbor, ‘Excuse me, will you pass me that bowl?’”
Before you know it, strangers are sharing ingredients, prep tools, and conversation. Natalia explained, “All of a sudden, people are vibing and laughing. And I absolutely love that.”
That vibe carries over to the food service. Once the pasta has been taken to the kitchen for final preparation, “That's when I open up the doors to reveal this beautiful dinner table, and it's all family style, and it's one table,” said Natalia. “So all these people have been working together, and now we’ve seated them next to each other.”
As Natalia joked, “I feel like I trick people into talking to each other.”
5. Running a Predictable Operation
While the Midnight Pasta experience may be entirely novel and a little unpredictable, the nature of the business itself is actually quite predictable in the best possible way. That’s the beauty of hosting a fully ticketed dining experience. As Natalia explained, “because we're not a restaurant, I am only going to be serving maybe 150 people in a week.”
That type of predictability makes it easier to streamline inventory management, Natalia told us. As she pointed out, “Our food waste is quite minimal. We have a dream setup that a lot of chefs don't have. So we can be very specific with what we get.”
Not only does this predictability make it possible to order ingredients with greater precision, but it also gives Natalia the flexibility to work as much as possible with local food purveyors. She explained, “We're really serious about keeping things hyper-local. So I've created these awesome connections with different farms and farmers, and we get to change the menu every month, almost.”
Finding the Right Tech For Your Vision
Whether you're looking for ways to streamline your inventory management process, reduce waste, or branch out into ticketed event hosting, there is technology that can help. Not sure where to start? Start by reaching out to one of our in-house restaurant tech experts for your free, personalized consultation.
