Richard and Mario Zeck

When it comes to making fresh pasta, how local can you go? Just ask brothers Mario and Richard Zeck, whose nascent business, LoRe Pasta, sources flours from Hunterdon and Bucks counties, eggs from Hillsborough, and herbs and vegetables from the farmers who sell at the West Windsor and Montgomery farmers markets where LoRe Pasta has tables each Saturday. Recent offerings, for example, included bright green rotini using Terhune Orchards spinach and a carrot pasta so colorful the brothers dubbed it “24-carrot gold.”

The business recently launched from a small, light-filled, newly renovated facility on Major Road in Monmouth Junction, all pristine white and stainless steel surfaces. But the enterprise was more than two years in the making. “The idea started after I got out of culinary school,” says Mario Zeck, 30, who attended Le Cordon Bleu in Las Vegas and who is LoRe’s chief pasta maker. “Towards the end I started working for an Italian chef who had a small pasta shop and was the only guy in the area making all his own pastas fresh every day. That’s where I got really passionate about pasta.”

The Zeck brothers had also grown up, in South Brunswick, in a pasta-loving family that’s half Italian-American. “Our grandmother is Sicilian; our grandfather, Italian. My grandmother made every meal an occasion and sparked my love of everything that revolves around family and big dinners,” Mario says. “Every single holiday. It didn’t matter which one — she’s like two percent Irish so there she is on St. Paddy’s Day, making corned beef with all the trimmings! So we’re always eating these great meals and having this great time with family.”