Organization and financing were not their strengths. “At first we lost money on the cheese,” he confesses, “because you have to turn it. And on wine—because we drank it.” But little by little they sold more and more pasta—literally tons of it.

“Don and I were active in neighborhood politics. We knew everybody,” de Garmo explains. “Our neighbors became our first customers. Don always said that it helped that my name ended with a vowel so people thought I was Italian.” Older members of the city’s Italian community eventually found the shop, too. Frank Nudo of Nick’s Famous Coney Island would march his customers outside and point them across the street. Many became regulars—always paying in cash, sometimes wearing slippers. “We had the luck of location, timing, and hiring incredible employees,” de Garmo insists. “We did it all by the seat of our pants.”

While Pastaworks has been at the center of Portland’s flourishing food scene, de Garmo is quick to note that he and Oman truly were two of the unlikeliest guys to lead such a charge. Growing up in Los Angeles and later in Northern California, de Garmo had gone to plenty of small, ethnic markets, delis, and butchers, yet none of these inspired his idea for Pastaworks and there is little in his family’s culinary history that would have led him to a food career. Of the two, Oman, a construction millwright from Scappoose, was the one who had at least visited Italy once before, but he was Norwegian American, “where white is the predominant food color,” de Garmo jokes.

“We had no idea what we were doing,” says de Garmo. “There were two Italian old-timers who traveled up and down the West Coast working for food distributors. Once they had us taste extra-virgin olive oil from Tuscany. After we swallowed, we got this flash of peppery intensity. We thought: This stuff sucks. But they kept coming back and having us try new things. Slowly they educated us.”

Fortunately for the partners, there was one part of their inventory that didn’t depend on education: wine. “What I loved about Italian wine was the flavor and that it was considered a food product,” de Garmo explains. “Its purpose is to complement—not displace—food.” Their buying principle for wine (as well as the rest of the products they carry on their shelves) was simple: When de Garmo found something he liked, he carried it. And over the past 25 years, his palate has created one of the broadest and finest selections of Italian wines in the city and, at one time, in the country. (Don Oman left Pastaworks in 1997 and opened Casa Bruno, a wine importing business, the following year.)