Victoria Bermudez is an L.A. Pasta Granny in the Making

With Leona, she specializes in handmade and extruded pasta inspired by her own whims (and the farmers’ market).

Photographs by David Gurzhiev

Victoria Bermudez makes winter squash-filled pasta.

“I feel like it’ll only get more charming as I get older,” says Victoria Bermudez. We’re in her kitchen in Los Feliz talking about making pasta as she folds flat squares of handmade dough over tiny puréed mounds of roasted winter squash blended with garlic, mozzarella, aged parmesan, and a drizzle of honey. Bermudez runs the micro-batch fresh pasta company Leona, named after her great aunt. “If I’m still doing this in my 70s, I’ll be a nonna,” she adds, placing a perfect pouch of pasta, its stuffed semi-circle of a belly encased by a protective wing flap, on a tray atop her stove.

Her journey in manifesting a future as a pasta granny began during the pandemic. “I know it’s super cliché, but that’s when I really started messing around with food,” Bermudez says. Beforehand, her career was in restaurants, which meant she worked nights, clocking in as the bar director of Bestia, as a manager at All Time, and eventually as the assistant general manager at Here’s Looking At You. Then COVID forced restaurants to close, and suddenly, she was able to cook herself dinner. Like many of us, she took advantage of the downtime to bake bread from scratch, get into pickling and fermenting, and, eventually, make pasta by hand. She aced the other assignments, but homemade pasta proved difficult, and the challenge intrigued her. The humidity would cause issues, her ingredient ratios would be wrong, or the dough would be too sticky, too dry, or too prone to ripping. “It sent me down a rabbit hole of making pasta over and over and over again and figuring out how to do it,” she says. Because she was on unemployment, she was able to make pasta-making her full-time job.

As the story goes, once Bermudez had a sellable product, she began slinging pasta on Instagram. But, notably, she did one thing differently than most of her peers selling Detroit-style pizza and kouign-amann and chirashi boxes online: she obtained a cottage license and a seller’s permit, and made her business legally sound. Bermudez had all of her paperwork ready to go when the nonprofit Food Access LA (then known as SEE-LA) opened new vendor applications for the esteemed Hollywood Farmers’ Market in the summer of 2021. The selection committee tasted her pasta, and Leona was immediately granted a space in the prepared foods section of the market, just six months after she began selling on Instagram.

On Sundays at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, you can find Bermudez working the Leona table with a full slate of offerings. She makes a weekly-changing filled pasta inspired by the market, most recently, white sweet potato pansotti and whole leek scarpinocc. And she makes four types of extruded pasta—classic bucatini, green-tinted kale casarecce, purple-hued beet campanelle, and an orange-shaded Aleppo pepper creste di gallo—using a pasta extruder, which streamlines her process immensely. (When she first started selling at the market, she made every single shape by hand.) Because Leona is a one-woman operation, Bermudez has a limited production capacity and thus regularly sells out. More than 75% of her customers buy pasta every week, and nine times out of ten, all of her filled pasta is spoken for via pre-orders before she gets to the market. The filled pasta is a market-only special, but some of Leona’s extruded shapes can also be found at Bucatini and Wine + Eggs.

Over four years of reporting on the Los Angeles food scene, I’ve come to understand that phenomenal seasonal produce and a lack of agreed-upon norms are two core tenets of our diverse culinary landscape. Bermudez, then, fits in perfectly by bringing a creative edge to her craft. She is well-versed in many pasta shapes and techniques, but she also strays from Italian convention, preferring to play around with colors and designs according to her liking. “I’m super non-traditional,” she says. “Typically, every shape has a traditional sauce that goes with it and every filled pasta has a traditional filling that goes with it... I’m not trying to play by any rules. I’m just doing my own thing.” As a result, she sometimes has to face trolls on Instagram, who take issue with her version of, say, cappellacci or cappelletti.

Bermudez’s home set-up includes a pasta extruder (left).

A box of Bermudez’s pasta will cost you more than a store-bought, shelf-stable product. In that sense, enjoying a bowl of Leona at home is akin to ordering pasta in a restaurant that makes their pasta in-house. “This is hand-cut, bronze-extruded, fresh pasta. It’s not dried, it’s not been sitting on a shelf, it’s ready to go for you to cook at home,” she says, adding that her prices ($10 for 8 ounces, $18 for 1 pound, and $20 for a serving of filled pasta) are still half of what you’d find on the menu at Bestia. “I like the idea of cutting out that middle man and creating restaurant-style [pasta] without having a restaurant.”

For Bermudez, there’s artistic longevity in pasta-making. “All the different shapes you’re able to make, all the ways you can manipulate the dough to create different designs, it’s endless the amount of things you can do,” she says. Recently, she started teaching monthly pasta-making classes at Bucatini as a way to share her self-taught knowledge. Her ultimate dream? A pasta shop of her own, anchored by a colorful case filled with fresh, daily-made pasta. There’s nothing quite like it in L.A. Naturally, it’ll be called Leona. “A lot of people call me Leona,” Bermudez says, laughing. “So many people go, ‘Are you Leona?’ And I say, ‘I am. My name is Victoria, but I am Leona.’”

Victoria Bermudez and her two-year-old son.