ABOVE: Now its new storefront, Onda Pasta & Provisions new store front is as close to a neighborhood mercato as you'll find in Hawaii.
Asked about his favorite pasta shape, Paolo Del Prete points to the tattoo on his forearm: spaghetti twirled around a fork, the strands slicked with tomato sauce and adorned with a sprig of basil. Del Prete oversees the handmade-pasta operations—today, pappardelle ribboning out of the extruder and rigatoni drying on trays above a fan—at the Onda Pasta & Provisions shop in Kaimuki. The new store offers about a dozen types of pasta, including unusual shapes like the ruffle-edged mafaldine, hollow strands of bucatini and flavored pastas such as a basil spaghetti, which Del Prete recommends tossing with barely cooked chopped cherry tomatoes, mozzarella, a drizzle of olive oil and fresh basil as a garnish. Don't have a good finishing olive oil? You'll find that here, too, on the well-stocked shelves, plus house-made ragu, Sicilian salted capers, European natural wines and gelato from Honolulu's Il Gelato.
When Onda Pasta began in 2011, it was one of the first businesses in Honolulu making fresh pasta. Its founder, Andrea Onetti, was raised in Rome and started selling tagliatelle and gnocchi at Oahu farmers markets, eventually supplying about eighteen establishments around the island. If you're eating fresh pasta at a place that didn't make it, it's likely from Onda. Brick Fire Tavern, next door to the current Onda Pasta storefront, is among those restaurants, offering pasta plates, like a casarecce (short and loosely rolled) with Calabrian sausage and a tomato vodka sauce, alongside its Neapolitan pizzas.
In 2023, Danny Kaaialii, a veteran restaurateur, along with Matt Resich, the owner of Brick Fire Tavern, bought the business from Onetti. When they took over, they decided to "start a new chapter," Kaaialii says, in the form of the Onda Pasta & Provisions shop, while still making pasta for Honolulu's restaurants—twenty-six and counting. Del Prete tweaked the recipes slightly, adjusting ratios of flour, semolina, eggs and water adapted to the slightly cooler and drier conditions in the Kaimuki production kitchen that Kaaialii and Resich built out.
Del Prete, who is from Naples, Italy, says he's a relentless perfectionist, which he attributes to his twenty-one years as a platoon commander in the Italian army. He started his new career when he joined Onda Pasta in 2022. He says when he began making pasta, "I remember when I was a child, preparing fresh pasta at home with my mother and my grandmother." He decided on the spaghetti tat, he says, because "I couldn't help but fall in love with this job."
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