AGILITY & CREATIVITY

Looking back at 2025, it’s fair to say it’s been another year of major shifts in hospitality. Customers are more selective about where they dine and how they spend, so you have to stay nimble in these tough conditions. As operators, we’ve all had to keep adapting. For us at Pastino, our first full year of trading has been about understanding the space we’re in, responding quickly and staying focused on what we set out to do: offer genuinely fresh pasta, made properly, at a price people can afford every day.

When we opened at the end of 2024, we spotted a clear gap in the market. London has so many brilliant high-end pasta restaurants, but nobody was offering freshly made pasta in the grab-and-go space. What was available was either mass-produced or overpriced, and neither worked for the modern customer.

No one was making pasta in front of guests, cooking sauces from scratch on-site or delivering that quality at a fair price point, especially with so much pressure on the sector around rising costs.

From day one, we committed to doing things openly and honestly. We moved our pasta machines into the window, had a prep chef in from 6:30am and made every sauce fresh. Nothing is bought in and assembled; we genuinely make it all. A simple bowl of pasta might look effortless, but it takes a huge amount of work.

AUTHENTICITY MATTERS

Pasta is something many people cook at home, so we have to offer dishes they’re not making themselves and often haven’t even heard of.

That’s why ingredients matter. If you’re making carbonara, you use guanciale, not bacon. You use the best tomatoes you can. The challenge is doing all of that while keeping a bowl at £4–£7, but we’re proud of how we’ve managed it. Hearing customers describe it as ‘proper pasta’ means everything to us.

Regular fresh pasta still leads the way, especially the non-egg version, which customers seem to prefer. Rigatoni is our top seller by a long way. It’s familiar, holds sauce well and people trust it. It also feels like a ‘levelled-up’ version of penne, which helps with recognition.

But alongside the classics, we were keen from the start to introduce dishes people don’t tend to cook at home, like Zozzona. Many customers didn’t know it, and that little moment of discovery is important. Pasta is a comfort food at heart on a cold, grey day; nothing beats opening a steaming bowl that feels like a hug. That’s the feeling we try to create.

GUIDED BY ITALY

There’s no shortage of food trends flying around, especially online, where dishes are sometimes made more for social media than for taste – that’s not us. We’re open to collaboration but we’re not going to jump on something silly for clicks that fails to build customer loyalty. 

Instead, we look back to Italy. Earlier this year, we spent time in Rome and Milan, and that research trip fed directly into our menu development. There is such a breadth of regional dishes, from the north to the south, and there’s still so much for us to discover and explore properly. Bringing those ideas into a format where you take an order and serve a bowl of fresh pasta in two-and-a-half to three minutes takes real skill, which is why staying rooted in proper Italian principles matters far more than chasing trends.

And like every operator, we’ve had to navigate rising costs. But rather than raise prices, we simplified our menu. Our original offer was too big and complicated for a true quick-service model. We realised early on that we’d overcomplicated things. Bringing it back to what people were returning for, and pairing that with the rebrand, improved our sales, service speed and staff efficiency. Today, our single site is performing well, which gives us the freedom to hold our price point. Repeat customers matter more to us than squeezing margins.

If this year taught us anything, it’s that doing the simple things properly will always beat trend-hopping. We’re not looking to chase trends in 2026. Our goal is to keep growing carefully, open more sites using a model that’s working, refine things seasonally and continue the menu development process we’ve built.

We’re excited, we’re energised… and we’re only just getting started.

Pastino is located at 92 Tottenham Court Road, London. Opening hours 11am-10pm, dine in or takeaway. Visit pastino.co.uk.