Kent and Patsy McNall were running a restaurant in Florida when customers from Westfield asked them to come home to Indiana and bring their delightful sauces with them. Now, Pasto Italiano, 3150 E. State Road 32, Westfield, offers an intimate setting, daily specials, music from Eddie Money’s former guitarist and of course, the sauces.
“We were down in Florida for about five years,” Patsy told The Reporter. “Kent is friends with John Perazzo who owned J. Razzo’s restaurant in Carmel. He called us when we were running an Italian fine-dining establishment called Cibo in Fort Myers.”
According to Kent, they had several couples from Westfield who visited the restaurant in Fort Myers. The couples were snowbirds visiting the Sunshine State in the winter.
“Our regulars in Florida said they’d love to have these sauces in a place up there,” Kent said. “They told us, ‘You haven’t been up there in a while; you should see all the development.’ We came up from Florida a couple years ago and saw John Perazzo. We took Patsy’s mom out to dinner there. We talked to John and he said he was going to close that location and sell this one. With all the construction on 31 at the time he didn’t know who was going to buy that because everything was going out of the center over there.”
Patsy said Kent starting driving around the Westfield area to check out the neighborhood and they were impressed with what they found.
“Kent looked at the neighborhood here and saw how quick it was growing and how wonderful and booming this area was,” Patsy said. “So, we made our menu and sold our condo and came back up here! We have had the warmest reception from the people here in Westfield, Carmel and Noblesville. We have been received very well. They have been so marvelous about our returning. They are just really nice people. I just can’t say enough about them.”
Pasto Italiano features daily specials and live acoustic jazz on Wednesday evenings with Benito DiBartoli, former guitarist for Eddie Money.
“Benito lives here in town,” Kent said. “I have known him for years. We had talked about when we opened. But Eddie was still around and I didn’t want to do it if he couldn’t commit to being here. At that time, he was never sure because sometime a show would come up and he might have to like fly to Philadelphia or somewhere. He still has a blues band and does a lot of jazz guitar now.”
You can hear DiBartoli from 5:30 to 8 p.m. on Wednesdays, which is also half-price bottle of wine night.
And what about those sauces and recipes the snowbirds wanted to have closer to home?
“All our sauces are all made from scratch,” Patsy told The Reporter.
After they both took a moment to taste the day’s sauce and decide if it needed any adjustments before customers started to arrive, Kent told The Reporter, “I pick out all the produce. I personally pick out every head of lettuce, every batch of tomatoes. Every day.”
According to Patsy, Pasto Italiano has a wine selection stocked mostly with options you can’t find anywhere else.
“It’s like a little ‘Cheers’ in here,” Patsy said. “Especially on the weekends half the people in here know each other when they come in. And who doesn’t love Italian?”
You can visit Pasto Italiano at 3150 E. State Road 32, Westfield. They are open seven days a week: 4 to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 4 to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Visit pastoitalianowestfield.com or call (317) 804-2051 for reservations, catering options and daily specials.