Chef Anthony Strong is financing his third Pasta Supply Co — a small counter shop at 919 Cole St — by selling $550 one-year and $4,000 lifetime fresh-pasta subscriptions instead of taking a bank loan. The campaign passed the halfway mark of its $400,000 goal in its first week.

Anthony Strong is paying for his third pasta shop the way he does his own tiling and wiring: himself. Rather than borrow from a bank to build out Pasta Supply Co's Cole Valley outpost at 919 Cole St, the chef is selling fresh-pasta subscriptions to the neighbors who will eat there — and one week in, the San Francisco Standard reported (external source, opens in a new tab), the do-it-yourself campaign runs entirely through the company's website and Instagram, not a crowdfunding platform.

The offer is simple. Pay $550 and collect a box of fresh pasta every week for a year; pay $4,000 and collect one every week for life, with no age limit on who can hold the membership. One buyer, the Standard and other outlets noted, registered the lifetime tier in a child's name — a wager on decades of weekly boxes. Members can start picking up now at the Mission or Richmond shops or hold out for Cole Valley; they can skip a week, but they can't hoard a month's worth for one trip. WhatNow SF reported (external source, opens in a new tab) that the one-year tier is capped at 200 slots and the lifetime tier at 100, against a $400,000 target the drive had already half-cleared inside its first week.

The room those dollars are building is small by design. The old Peet's Coffee space runs about 700 square feet, with roughly two dozen seats inside, a few sidewalk tables, and orders taken at the counter. Stuffed pastas and sauces get made each day at the company's Mission production kitchen — open since 2024 — then driven over, leaving the tiny Cole Valley kitchen to do little more than boil and heat. Strong, a Cole Valley resident of 12 years, told the Standard he wants doors open in October; the business registered with the City as CVPSC LLC on June 30.

The math is the tell. A hundred lifetime memberships at $4,000 apiece is $400,000 — the entire goal, funded off the tier built for superfans. It is an odd way to underwrite a lease and a revealing one: in a year when San Francisco operators are betting on smaller, cheaper rooms, Strong is skipping the loan officer and asking his own corridor to prepay in rigatoni.