At DeMarco’s, Anthony Pepe treats Greenville diners to a taste of the Northeast
If you’ve ever seen the photos that Anthony Pepe and his wife, Jennifer, started posting on Instagram in 2018, you’ll agree with that old adage, “a picture’s worth 1,000 words.”
One look will convince you that words aren’t sufficient to describe the pictures (did someone say food porn?) of pasta dishes that the Long Island native made at the couple’s home in Simpsonville. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before his Instagram account, @thepastaaddict, garnered an impressive online following and began spurring inquiries about where folks could find his tantalizing food.
Fans’ requests found a cargo container outlet when Anthony and Jennifer opened The Pasta Addict at Gather GVL in 2019—just before COVID hit. Two years later, Pepe folded his pasta recipes into Slice of Brooklyn pizza shop in Simpsonville.
In February 2025, Pepe, along with partners Mike Wible and Genine and Mike Baldassara, opened DeMarco’s Italian restaurant a short ball-toss from Fluor Field. The original concept was to make Neapolitan-style pizza, but while experimenting with creating other Italian dishes, they realized they could do so much more.
Pepe, whose restaurant experience is behind the bar, creates the recipes that reflect food his grandmother made back in New York—dishes like lasagna with broken meatball sauce, rigatoni with spicy vodka sauce, and sausage-stuffed long hot peppers.
Pepe’s addiction to pasta started when he worked as a mixologist at Bar Italia on New York City’s Upper East Side. “The first dish I had there was veal bolognese,” he recalls. “That dish single-handedly changed everything I wanted to do. It was a whole other side of authentic Italian cuisine that I didn’t know about until then.”
At DeMarco’s, the staff’s attention to detail reveals itself in the imported Italian 00 flour they use in their pizza dough, the mozzarella curds they hand-pull, and the pasta they make in-house each day. “We nerd out on the food,” Pepe says, laughing. “That’s what makes us special.”
Fresh pasta at DeMarco’s
Much of the fresh pasta is put through an extruder, but the noodles are hand-cut by Frank Ardito, aka Dr. Fettucine. “He’s the heart of our pasta program,” says Pepe. Ardito retired here from New York and wanted “to do a little something,” so he started with Pepe at Gather GVL. Now he works at DeMarco’s five days a week.
Leading the kitchen is Executive Chef Wilbert Sauceda, who’s been at the restaurant since day one. If Pepe’s the brains behind the recipes, Sauceda is the brawn. Sauceda provides the skill and techniques to execute the dishes as the owner envisions them. “When you think about marinara, it’s more than just tomatoes, it’s technique,” explains the chef. “The way we cook our vodka sauce, you would never think it took two and a half hours to cook one sauce.”
Be it through pizza, pasta, or other Italian fare, Pepe’s goal at DeMarco’s is to share with his diners a taste of the food he grew up eating in the Northeast. “If I had to sum up this place in one line,” he says, “I’d say it’s like grandma went to culinary school.”
The real deal
Although DeMarco’s menu encompasses a range of Italian dishes, the restaurant’s cornerstone is the pizza. Two Acunto wood-fired pizza ovens from Naples, Italy, stand front and center when you enter. Though the original concept was to make Neapolitan pizza, Pepe and his partners found the crust of true Neapolitan pie to be a bit too soft.
“We found we liked our crust crispier, so we cook it at a little lower temperature. Our style is more neo-Neapolitan,” he notes.
The most popular pie? Pistachio Mortadella, a pistachio pesto base topped with mortadella (a silky fat-studded Italian sausage made with cured pork) and a cheesy layer of stracciatella, fontina, parmesan, and house-made mozzarella.
366 Field St., Ste. A, Greenville, demarcositalian.com
