Calling all pasta lovers! We’re thrilled to share a First Look at Giovanni Fresco’s new location in Glens Falls. While they’ve been serving their scratch made Italian food at Farmers Markets across the area for 7 years, their new permanent home in Glens Falls has been open just over two months and is already a fan favorite. We caught up with owner Giovanni Casanica to hear a bit more about the new space, their plans to grow into a neighborhood shop, and the pasta, of course!
Giovanni and Francesca with their new addition, son Gabriele
On the American Dream
My wife Francesca and I moved here from Italy in late December 2016. My parents moved here first, so we came for the summer and fell in love with the area — Glens Falls, Lake George, Saratoga. We decided to move here and start our own business. I always wanted to have something of my own, and I just never could there — so we came here.
We started our business in 2017. In the beginning our business name was GF for Giovanni and Francesca. My wife decided she’d rather not have her name on it, so we started thinking of something else that could replace that part of the name, and we came up with Fresco, because in Italian, fresco means fresh. And that’s what we do. Everything that we do is made fresh, and it’s made daily. We cook on the spot for most of our catering and markets, so having Fresco in the name just made sense.
On Opening the Space
We started our business at Farmers Markets, and that continued to grow. Last year we were doing 6 markets every week, all over the area — Troy, Schenectady, Saratoga. We rented out different commercial kitchens to prepare food, which started to become difficult, especially as there was more demand for our product. So, we decided to take the next step, which was to find a permanent location.
Finding a location was really hard, and took us a lot of time. But in the end it worked out great because we were able to purchase this location in Glens Falls last year. We’ve been doing The Shirt Factory events in this neighborhood for the past five years now, so we were getting a customer base and a demand in this area.
At the beginning we were just using it as a commercial space. We renovated the kitchen and everything else on the interior, but we mainly used the kitchen while we finished out our summer season last year. We wanted to wait a bit before opening the actual shop, but there was so much demand for it. People would knock on the door asking when we were going to open, so we decided to just go for it.
We opened the shop the first week of December. It’s been incredible. The amount of support and love that we got from the community has been insane. We have a customer that donated our tables. We have a customer that donated the stone countertop. Everyone has been supportive of not only our food, but of our store as a place in the community.
When we were purchasing the building, we found out that this was historically an Italian neighborhood, so I was excited to bring that back. We have so many customers that have told us stories about growing up in the neighborhood, and they relate to our food because it brings back those good memories. Unfortunately through the generations, Italians have lost some connection with homemade cooking. So we are able to give them that connection, those memories, and that’s incredible. We’re happy that we are able to bring that nostalgia back to the neighborhood.
On The Importance of Family
We have a poster in our shop that includes the line ‘Bringing Family Back Together’. Every day we have a different family meal that feeds 4-6 people. For us it’s very important. In Italy, family meals are the most important thing. Everything closes at 1pm, you have a 3 hour break with all of your family for lunch, you go back to work, and then you have dinner all together later. So that’s the type of feeling we want to bring back and give to the customer with our family meals. It’s affordable, made fresh, made daily. It’s important to us to continue doing that. Here in the US, people are so dedicated to work. Always thinking about work, and just constantly working — which is great because there’s a lot of opportunity. But every now and then, I’d encourage people to take a break, we’ll take care of dinner, and just enjoy the family and enjoy the moments.
On Authentic Italian Food
I’ve always loved cooking. I cooked all the time with my grandmother, and I wanted to bring back those old recipes and ways of making the food. It’s been great for customers to see the pasta getting rolled and cut in front of them at the markets and events that we do. It’s something they’ve never seen before.
We want to give customers the same flavors and tastes that we grew up with. The sauces are made just like we made in Italy. Everything is based on fresh ingredients in a good ratio. Our sauces cook for hours just like we did in Italy. That makes a big difference. We don’t add sugar, and our customers say that they don’t suffer from acidity from our sauce like they might with others here. It’s just those fresh tomatoes cooking for hours.
On Fan Favorites
Our most popular item is our fresh pasta. That’s what we’re known for, and there’s a lot of demand for it. We have it here to sell for customers to make at home, but a lot of customers prefer for us to cook it — so don’t worry about it, we’ll continue doing that here as well!
Our fried items are popular as well. We have four different kinds of arancini — traditional, Sicilian, mushroom and sausage, and spinach, and we also do a fried mac and cheese. Those are available every Friday and Saturday at the shop, since those are our frying days.
On The Future
Our next step is to evolve our space into a one stop shop. To us, this isn’t just a take-out place, it’s a neighborhood shop. We’re going to be carrying more authentic Italian goods and local favorites, for example Puckers Pickles and North Hudson Coffee. We’d like to have fresh produce and eggs this summer. We also have Villa’s Bread delivered fresh every morning, steaming hot. We’re trying to get the best ingredients and products out there and bring them to our shop.
