A brand-new independent pasta restaurant has opened in Newbury presenting a whole new take on many of the traditional Italian dishes we all know and love. 

Owner Hugo Lesser, who previously had never worked in food before, found his love for these new types of pasta dishes whilst living in South America for a brief period of time.

He discovered that loads of Italians immigrated there 100 years ago, and subsequently set up multiple restaurants selling their native cuisine. 

"But there were different ingredients available there and Italian food has sort of evolved differently," Mr Lesser said. 

"So there's a lot of different pasta recipes. All different from the Italian dishes we know and are used to but still all delicious. I thought that would be really interesting in England."

When Mr Lesser moved back to England, he held onto the idea on starting up a food business. 

He then started speaking to people in the industry he knew could help him and assembled a team.

This included a chef who had trained with Gordan Ramsay who allegedly found the Italian South-American recipe idea inspiring. 

Their head chef also lived in Italy for ten years, so as great experience in all things pasta. 

"Our menu is a combination of classic Italian dishes with freshly made pasta and what we call gourmet pasta is all the Italian South American ones," Mr Lesser continued 

"All our pasta is freshly made on site and very few places do that as a focus. A lot used dried pasta with preservatives and so on. It's made on site here and tastes completely different."

Gourmet Pasta Co opened three weeks ago in Newbury and has already seen plenty of customers with many coming back for more. 

"Our most popular dish at the moment is one of our gourmet pasta dishes from South America as opposed to the more traditional dishes," Mr Lesser said. 

"There is something called Sorrentios and they are like large filled ravioli but they're round. Because they are bigger you get more filling to pasta ratio. We do these lovely green ones with spinach mixed in with the pasta and they are filled with chicken and prosciutto.

"That's proving really popular at the moment. Each of our pasta dishes are paired with a sauce that is chosen specially by our chef."

To find our more about Gourmet Pasta Co, please click the website link here.