Midnight Pasta Co.’s parties may be the best dinner-and-a-show combo in Philly

Natalia Lepore Hagan has a knack for dramatics, in a good way. It comes in handy at her Midnight Pasta parties — usually held at the very reasonable hour of 6 p.m. — which seamlessly blend a pasta-making workshop with a well-paced five-course meal that progresses in such a way, the whole affair manages to transcend the average cooking class. To pull this off, the New York transplant plays various roles over the course of an evening: host, instructor, entertainer, director.

“One little thing about me, before I get it going,” Lepore Hagan shouts over a small crowd gathered inside BLDG39 at the Arsenal, an industrial warehouse-turned-event venue in Bridesburg, on a recent Friday evening. “I used to do a Broadway touring show, I was a singer and dancer, so I really like applause —” she pauses to bask as the audience claps — “but also I’m going to be spinning around and dancing. You’ll get used to it.”

The spinning and dancing gives Lepore Hagan an excuse to check in on some two dozen participants who are here to whip up a batch of fresh fettuccine and pappardelle. Each one of us stands before a tidily arranged setup: cutting board, fork, and pasta cutter, plus a single egg nestled on a generous swirl of flour.

I was a little tense when I arrived, having braved Roosevelt Boulevard at rush hour. But my exasperation quickly melted away, thanks to appetizers (olives, charcuterie, crostini with garlic-Parmesan butter), a welcome drink (a negroni-jungle bird mash-up), and a good chat with bartender Taylor Rand-McKenney.

“It’s called Midnight Pasta because it’s based on a family tradition of mine to eat pasta at midnight, because I come from a very wild, wacky Italian-American family,” Lepore Hagan explains. “In my family, you start making pasta as young as 5 years old. If I could make it at 5 years old, I promise you, you can do it today.”

Before demonstrating how to mix the egg and flour, Lepore Hagan introduces the rest of the cast: BLDG 39 owner Brandon Weizer, support staffer Maya Jacobsen, chef Chelsea Krier, and sous chef Karen Epley. The crew has been working together on BYOB Midnight Pasta parties for a little over a year, and they have it down pat. They’ve thought through all the little details from start to finish — labeling each group’s wine bottles, broadcasting close-ups of Lepore Hagan’s demo on a big-screen TV, handing out to-go boxes for leftovers at the end of dinner. It delivers everything you’d hope in return for its $125-per-person price tag.

Midnight Pasta’s origin story is windy. It traces back to Lepore Hagan’s upbringing: She grew up in Ohio in a big family, the daughter of two politicians with a passion for the arts. (Her mom was a trained dancer and directed the performing arts series at Youngstown State University before transitioning to politics at age 60.) Lepore Hagan first learned pasta-making under the instruction of her grandfather, an abstract expressionist and art professor, and took to it right away. “I was the one who fell in love with it the most, and once I got old enough, I would be making pasta for 30 people for our Christmas Eve dinners,” she tells me in an interview.

For the first decade of Lepore Hagan’s professional career, food took a backseat to Broadway. She moved to New York in 2012 to pursue the stage, at first living with her aunt. That’s where the midnight pasta tradition was born. “The name is a popular dish in Italy,” Lepore Hagan says. “But [my version] was built around my aunt’s table in Manhattan. Everyone would go out and have wild day doing whatever they were doing — my aunt’s a fashion designer, my cousin’s an actress, I would be doing dance classes and auditions all day — and then we’d come back to the table and we’d all finished doing whatever at midnight, and we would make the biggest pot of glorious pasta.”

Pasta became more central to Lepore Hagan when the pandemic hit and Broadway shut down. She tapped her grandfather for recipes to try out while stuck in a small apartment with her husband and her brother. “I just started making pasta every single day and doing these cooking videos. It was bringing people joy, and bringing me joy, and it was a way that I was still performing, but I was cooking,” she says.

The experience was so gratifying that Lepore Hagan decided to go to culinary school online, during which time she did an externship at Lupa. She graduated in 2022. That same year, she got married and moved to Fishtown, where her husband, Sean Sweeney, owned a home. (Sweeney, a Fairmount native and well-traveled stagehand, passed in 2023.) “He said, ‘You know I have a house in Philadelphia that my cousin was living in and now it’s just sitting there,’” Lepore Hagan remembers. “We ran down to Philly and started renovating this house, and then I just fell in love with Philadelphia.”

Months later, Lepore Hagan’s Instagram cooking videos caught the attention of Fishtown Seafood owner Bryan Szeliga, who had been looking for a fresh pasta purveyor to carry. He approached Lepore Hagan about producing some for his corner store in Fishtown. “I lived down the street.” Lepore Hagan says, “so I came in, and [Szeliga] was like, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘OK, let’s try it. Let’s just try.’ And then it went so well, I would come in every week and just make pasta for a day, and they would sell it.”

Thus Midnight Pasta Co. was born — you can still buy fresh noodles at Fishtown Seafood’s three locations. The party side of the concept manifested after Lepore Hagan connected with Brandon Weizer, whose family also runs the Culinary Collective, a commissary kitchen also in Bridesburg. With help from Weizer and hospitality marketing consultant Kerri Sitrin, Lepore Hagan crafted Midnight Pasta’s parties, which weave together a lifetime of skills. “All of these different steps ended up making this kind of perfect thing for me,” Lepore Hagan says.

Midnight Pasta parties are cooking classes, yes, but they’re also like a 2½-hour interactive play. Lepore Hagan gives a breezy, endearing performance — you won’t see her sweat but these are clearly a lot of work — as she guides folks through how to mix a cracked egg into the flour, blending it with the fork until it’s cohesive enough to knead smooth. It’s messy at first, but comes together in a minute or two.

Once everyone has a golden ball of dough to show for themselves, she demonstrates the rolling process: feeding dough through a hand-cranked machine numerous times, changing the machine’s settings so the round of dough gradually becomes a long, thin sheet that one can cut into noodles (thin with a straight edge for fettuccine, thick and curly for pappardelle).

This stage is important to complete fast, Lepore Hagan emphasizes. “It will dry out quickly if it sits too long,” she says, directing small groups to work together on feeding their individual dough through Midnight Pasta’s handful of pasta rollers. She encourages the crowd to make a little competition of which group can reach the right thinness first — and gives them an alternative if they’re overwhelmed by the task.

“If you’re like, ‘I don’t want to do all that work, Natalia, that looks awful,’ you can come up here with Chef Chelsea, and she can just easily make that happen,” she says as she feeds a ball of dough through a food processor’s pasta roller and cutter attachments, making perfect noodles in mere moments. “I’m gonna go put on a really crazy Italian song on, and then when you are done, I want you all to do this again —” she waves a red napkin above her head — “so you make everybody realize that they need to go quicker.”

Sometimes these group exercises can feel like a grade-school flashback, but Midnight Pasta’s cooking-with-strangers session is genuinely fun (and fast). The class portion of the event wraps up before 7:30 p.m., at which point Lepore Hagan’s crew circulates with a sheet pan to collect tangles of fettuccine and pappardelle. They’re taken back to the kitchen, to be cooked as the main course.

“Welcome to our little Italian-American dreamland!” Lepore Hagan announces five minutes later. She and her crew whisk away screens from the edge of the room to reveal a long communal table set for 28 draped in a red-and-white-checkered cloth and festooned with fat-bottomed, wax-streaked wine-bottle candle holders. Hits by Louis Prima, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin waft out of speakers as people find seats and introduce themselves to their neighbors. I feel like I’m inside a scene from Lady and the Tramp; all that’s missing is an accordion player.

The staff doles out thick slices of garlic-shallot focaccia, then ferries in shaved Parmigiano-apple salads and platters of roasted butternut squash. “If you’ll notice, there’s only four bowls on the table so that means you have to share with your neighbors and your best friends,” Lepore Hagan says. “Make sure everybody gets fed, like a big, beautiful Italian family!”

By the time we’re tucking into our fettuccine alla Norma (made with our collective noodles), everyone knows everyone in their immediate radius and has barely saved any room for the penultimate course, brown butter-sage pappardelle with walnuts. (Midnight Pasta’s menu changes seasonally, so enter without expectation.) Thank goodness for the takeout boxes.

Well before midnight — around 8:30 p.m. — Lepore Hagan adjourns the table for a glass of limoncello, a square of shortbread, and a group photo. “This is the saddest moment of the night for me, because I have to say that our dinner party is now over,” she says. At least one partygoer gasps, “Nooo!” not yet ready to depart.

Lepore Hagan relishes the opportunity to provide an escape, especially now. She recalls an instance where she had to perform in a show after a shooting. “We got everyone together onstage before we started the show, because it felt insincere or sad to have to perform this happy-go-lucky tap performance when there was such tragedy happening. And I remember saying to all my friends, ‘This is what we’re here for. We’re here to give people a reprieve.’

“I can kind of transfer that same sentiment from performing into these classes,” she says. “People come in with their guard up, and they leave with new friends and plans to go to Pilates with strangers the next day.”

Midnight Pasta Co. has several upcoming pasta parties in April. Check midnightpasta.com/events and @midnightpastaco on Instagram for more events. You can buy packages of Midnight Pasta Co.’s fresh pasta at Fishtown Seafood locations in Fishtown (339 Belgrade St.), Fitler Square (2131 Pine St.), and Haddonfield (114 Kings Hwy E.).