Jimmy Pardini reflects on taking risks and raising the bar on Fresno food

Any time Fresno gets a new restaurant with a menu that doesn’t include five types of burgers on it feels like cause for celebration. That’s not to say that we don’t have some great restaurants with vast burger selections, or that we don’t love a great burger; sometimes it just feels like there’s a gap in the market around here between casual family eateries and fussy overpriced ones.

That’s part of what makes Jimmy Pardini’s restaurants feel like such a welcome part of the local culinary scene. At The Annex Kitchen (opened in 2015), Annesso Pizzeria (2021), and now Willow Osteria (2025), Pardini specializes in fresh pastas and wood-fired pizzas, serving food that stands out as “good,” and not just “good for Fresno.” It feels like he’s broadening the scope of the kinds of restaurants that can thrive here, without pandering to an outsider’s assumptions of what we already like, or imposing their conceptions of what we’ll think is fancy.

Pasta and pizza aren’t fancy, really, they’re just… hard to do well. Distinguishing yours from the next guy’s takes a certain amount of dedication – some might say obsession. It’d be easy to put a hand-made fettuccine or pappardelle on a menu (flat pasta shapes generally being the easiest to make fresh), and then fill out the rest of the pasta section with dry macaroni, paired with “upscale” ingredients, like shrimp or shellfish. Certainly no one would complain. Linguini with clams didn’t become ubiquitous because it isn’t good. 

Yet when I arrive at Pardini’s new(ish) restaurant, Willow Osteria, at 9 am one weekday morning (and this is before Willow Osteria instituted lunch service), the kitchen crew is already hard at work, not just prepping and chopping and saucing, but filling. Rolling. Resting. Extruding. Rigatoni, raviolo, squid ink linguini, all made on the premises. It takes a special kind of sicko to extrude, as Willow Osteria does, house-made bucatini for the kids’ menu. (That’s a long, hollow, cylindrical noodle, similar to spaghetti, but with a tiny hole in the middle. Good luck attempting that one at home). 

Jimmy Pardini, a sporty-casual youngish dad with floppy hair who looks like the kind of guy you might get paired with on the golf course, walks around, mostly observing quietly, occasionally pausing to offer a tip on dough shaping, or to check the balance on the cuts of beef chuck going into the grinder. (Yes, Fresnans can even get a burger at a Pardini restaurant now, at least at lunch time).

Doing things differently, or with just a little more care, is something that might not immediately stand out to the average diner perusing a menu. It’s certainly possible to put out great pasta without house-making bucatini, or great pizza without stoking a wood-fired oven. Yet when you consider individual restaurants less as nodules of consumer service and more as part of a broader local food ecosystem of which all of a region’s restaurants are a part, you start to realize how important it is to raise the bar a little.

“I think the Central Valley is a great place to be in the restaurant business in California right now,” says Pardini. Jimmy is actually a third generation Fresno restaurateur. His grandfather, Albert, owned Town and Country Lodge, and three Pardini’s restaurants, starting in the 40s. His father, Jim, owned four Tony Roma’s franchises, Fresno’s first Rubio’s, and an expansive catering and concessions business (still thriving, with Jimmy’s brother Jeff focusing more on the catering side).

That “food was in his blood” would be easy to say, but it’s just as true that he seems determined to do things a little differently.

“When I first opened Annex, it was tough because there weren’t as many restaurants who were doing the kind of cooking that we were doing,” Pardini says. “Well, there weren’t any.”

That new-ness proved to be something of a challenge. It’s easy to have an idea for a restaurant with better food. The harder part is recruiting a staff who can execute it.

“You can’t just hire a fry cook who’s worked at Cheesecake Factory and throw ’em in there, though those people are also important,” Pardini says. “If I had opened a restaurant in LA, I could pick up people from Mozza and all these other great restaurants who can just go in and know what they’re doing.”

“But over the years, we’ve built the team and the culture here to where we have the people now, and there’s other restaurants that are doing good things in Fresno now too.” 

“Mozza” here refers to Osteria Mozza, Nancy Silverton’s James Beard-and-Michelin-awarded pizza-focused restaurant in West Hollywood. It was the place Jimmy Pardini took a job after college, and which has, much like Annex/Annesso/Willow Osteria, spawned several more focused spinoffs. 

Being inside of something, it’s easy to take for granted. For Pardini, it took some time in Italy to truly fall in love with the food business.

“I started traveling to Italy and studying Italian,” Pardini says. “I minored in Italian, and I studied abroad in Florence. I lived with an Italian family there, and I became sort of obsessed with Italian food after traveling all around. I started cooking at home and I just got more and more into it. And so then after I graduated college, I took a job at Osteria Mozza without ever going to culinary school.”

Pardini’s current crop of restaurants grew out of his family background in restaurants, his training at Osteria Mozza, and some powerful sense memories.

“The thing that really got me really hooked was actually Neopolitan Pizza,” Pardini says. “But it was Neopolitan Pizza in Florence.”

“We went there probably once or twice a week. There were only Italians there. Everybody’s out, all the Italians are smoking cigarettes in the alleyway. There were 20 seats, and it was just one guy working a wood-fired pizza oven. You sit down and you order a Moretti or a Peroni, and he had three pizzas on the menu. Margarita, Napoli, which is basically a margarita with anchovies, and then a marinara, which is a margarita with no cheese. I ate probably 50 margarita pizzas while I was there,” he explained.

With working at Mozza – who deserve a share of the credit for popularizing airy, leopard-spotted, wood-fired pizzas stateside – came not just the love of great pizza and pasta, but granular knowledge of how they were made, and how to produce them at scale.

“I saw opportunity in Fresno. Fresno needed better food, better restaurants, and I also felt like I could contribute to my dad’s business, so I moved back. I helped him out in the catering business for a couple of years, and then we opened Annex.”

Running the pasta station the morning I arrive at Pardini’s newest restaurant, Willow Osteria – pressing sheets of 15-egg, double-yolked fresh pasta, making ricotta nests to hold egg yolks, painstakingly turning them into raviolos, to be served with runny-egg centers – is Sergio, who says he’s worked with Pardini since he was a teenager. After four or five years with Annex, Sergio left for Roma Italian Kitchen, and has since returned to make pasta at Willow Osteria.

“At first I was worried about trying to manage multiple restaurants,” Pardini says. “There were a lot of hours in the beginning to kind of get it going. But it turned out there were a lot of people that just wanted to grow within the company who really stepped up to the plate.”

Simply staying open for 11 years, as Annex has, seems as good a benchmark of success as any in the restaurant business. But I ask if there was ever a moment when Pardini knew he had something like a “hit dish.”  

“That’s an easy one, it was the Fresno State corn agnolotti, which we do in the summertime at Annex,” Pardini says. “I love agnolottis. One of my favorite pasta shapes, if not my favorite.”

Agnolotti (“little rings”) are a stuffed pasta crimped on three sides – made with one pasta sheet folded over the filling. They’re similar to but distinct from ravioli, which are made with two pasta sheets, one atop another, with filling in the middle. Lots of chefs love agnolotti because there’s a bit less dough than with a ravioli, with a different balance of pasta and filling.

“And so I was like, all right, I’m going to take that Fresno State Corn and put that in the agnolotti, and let’s try that out. I still remember the first time I made one. I had my sous chef taste it, and his eyes just went like that.”

With a soft, creamy corn filling inside agnolotti pillows, served in a buttery reduction sauce with chopped chives, it’s a dish that sounds deceptively simple, something you might debate ordering at a restaurant where you can see cuts of meat sizzling over a wood-fired grill. Yet once you’ve had it, it’s hard to justify ordering anything else.

“It was a hit from the beginning,” Pardini says. “Simon Majumdar from the Food Network came to town, he was doing something here. He ordered two plates of it, and then he was like, ‘that’s the best thing I’ve eaten this year.’ And then he put it on his TV show, The Best Thing I Ever Ate. We came up with that dish probably a month into opening Annex, and it’s still the most popular dish that we’ve ever done. It’s funny because I feel like I’m still looking for my next one.”

In fact, that episode of The Best Thing I Ever Ate aired 10 years ago. As of February, the Fresno State sweet corn agnolotti was still making The Fresno Bee’s list of 10 essential Fresno dishes. 

Of course, having a hit dish can be a double-edged sword: being recognized for your innovation on the one hand, but being locked into making the same dish for 10 years on the other (even seasonally, as it were). Commerce thrives on stability; creativity on constant reinvention. 

Maybe that, as much as anything else, explains why Pardini keeps rolling the dice on new restaurants. His latest venture, set to join the Park Crossing complex with Annesso and Trader Joe’s off of Friant next to Woodward Park, is a sandwich spot called Strada (that’s Italian for “Road”). 

“I’ve always wanted to do a counter service place ever since I decided I was going to be in restaurants,” Pardini says. “But then I kept opening these full service places just because they were fun.”

Pardini originally envisioned Annesso (Italian for “annex”), in fact, as a more casual, more pizza-focused place. Then the size of the space required the menu and service to expand, to the point that now it’s more of an “all-encompassing” Italian restaurant. His counter-service vision was left unrealized.  

For all the hype around pizza, pasta, gelato, etc., one of the most memorable dishes that you’ll find in Tuscany (at least according to this writer) is schiacciata (skyuh-CHATa), a simple sandwich made of airy-but-thin focaccia bread, sliced through the middle, and grilled crispy on the outside, with a few indulgent fillings. While Pardini never uses the word schiacciata, it sure sounds like that’s what he’s planning.

“I think you can’t have a truly great sandwich without great bread,” Pardini explains. “The bread is light, but it has a crunch and it’s salty. Right now we’re making them with just semi-soft pecorino cheese or manchego, and then a spread, whether it’s sun-dried tomato or truffle or whatever, and then a salty, cured meat. And so it’s a really balanced sandwich where everything compliments one another. They’re my favorite types of sandwiches right now.”

A simple sandwich with cheese, a spread, and some cured meat doesn’t sound like a formula for a viral hit in today’s social media-driven restaurant ecosystem, which often seems to favor maximalism and frankenfoods. Then again, it was simplicity that drove Pardini’s first hit. Either way, the accolades and virality don’t seem to be what drives him. 

“As much as I came up in this very cheffyy culture in LA, I was never really into that part of it,” Pardini says. “Even if I were to open a restaurant in LA, I wouldn’t really want to deal with what Eater says or the LA Times says, or Michelin. I would just want to do whatever it is that I’m doing. There’s a sense of relief of being under the radar a little bit.”