Specialty of the House: Making Dough : Food: Pasta maker supplies top Southland restaurants with unusual shapes and fillings--but don’t look for them in your corner market.

GARDEN GROVE —  Would you like your ravioli stuffed with fresh lobster and crab meat? How about a dessert pasta filled with fresh blueberries or strawberries? Or be really decadent: Try bittersweet chocolate chips, ricotta cheese, lemon, orange and brandy rolled in fresh pasta and covered with raspberry sauce.

If you can come up with your own banquet idea--say, pasta shaped like a trapezoid in three colors and stuffed with exotic fowl--chances are that the small, steadily growing company that makes Pasta Mia brand products can do the job as well as anyone around.

“Give me an order, and I’ll make it for you,” said Diego Mazza, the 39-year-old founder of parent company Nina Mia Inc. in Garden Grove.

Mazza recently made filled fresh pasta in the shapes of elephants and palm trees--but he’s still trying to figure out how to do it quickly. Character-shaped pasta is one of a number of ideas Mazza is working on to keep ahead of the competition.

“It’s not enough to do fresh and good things; we have to do exclusive things,” he said, pointing to a striped pasta he created by overlaying sheets of egg, spinach and tomato pasta. “You’ll always find Pasta Mia on the cutting edge.”

Where you won’t find Pasta Mia products is on the shelves of grocery stores. The company makes only fresh pasta and doesn’t sell to the public. It serves restaurants and hotels, and chefs rave about it.

“Diego has super products,” said Philip Callahan, executive chef at the Sheraton Universal hotel in Universal City. “The pasta comes fresh and cooks perfectly.”

Late last year, Disneyland and Disneyland Hotel restaurants joined an impressive list of Pasta Mia customers, which includes the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Dana Point, the Ritz restaurant in Newport Beach, the Warehouse in Santa Monica and J.W. Marriott Hotel in Century City.

A pasta craze hit the nation in the 1980s, with saffron linguine, spinach spaghetti and the like becoming so popular that they are now a menu staple. Contadina and other producers are filling grocery shelves with fresh pasta and sauces.

What sells as fresh at grocery stores, however, doesn’t come close to what top restaurants serve. At Pasta Mia, for example, Mazza uses only fresh ingredients like tomatoes, garlic, spinach, bell peppers, mushrooms, herbs and a host of cheeses. For his dough, he mixes semolina only with durum flour and eggs, no water. The result is what chefs call not only the best commercially made pasta but also the most consistent.

“I have not run across anyone better, and I’ve tried a lot of them,” said Claude Koeberle, executive chef of the Ritz. “What makes Diego’s pasta better than others is the filling. Instead of ground lobster meat, you can see fresher lobster, chunks of it, in the filling.

“Diego also provides great service,” he said. “He’s always there for you. He can handle last-minute specialties.”

By hand and by machine, the 16 employees at Pasta Mia’s two government-approved plants crafted 9,000 pounds of pasta a week last year in more than 500 varieties--plus special orders. Their work helped the company’s annual revenue top $1.1 million, maintaining a 10% to 15% annual growth rate.

Mazza soon will be leaving for a trip to his native Italy to look for new machines with greater capabilities. He figures he’ll need them.

“Americans tend to eat more pasta than ever, about 19 pounds per person a year,” Mazza said. Industry experts, he said, expect that figure to hit 30 pounds a year by 2000. And that’s still far below the current consumption in Italy--55 pounds per person annually.

“I think we’re going to be around for a while,” he said.

He wasn’t always sure of that.

A premed dropout who abandoned pharmaceutical sales in Italy, Mazza came to California in 1980 from a small town in the Italian Alps. He started working in Southland restaurants, changing jobs 19 times in four years as he ascended from busboy and waiter to manager. During those years, he recalls, he was eating too many hamburgers and missing the kind of food his grandmother used to make.

“I was dreaming about my Italian food,” he said. “Finally, I said that if nobody makes my food, I would.”

Stepping in as a luncheon chef at a Newport Beach restaurant in the mid-1980s, Mazza decided that food was his future. With machines sent from Italy by his father, he started making pasta at night and delivering it to nearby eateries while working as a restaurant manager by day.

Koeberle at the Ritz says of Mazza: “I like his dedication. . . . He wants to try to do his best for customers. He’s extremely enthusiastic, and over the years his product has improved.”

Koeberle, whose personal Pasta Mia favorites are squash tortellini and asparagus ravioli, said he also likes the fact that Mazza steps into the kitchen to help chefs learn how to prepare and store fresh pasta to retain its taste.

While Pasta Mia uses mostly cheese and vegetable fillings, it also makes a limited quantity of meat fillings. But the meat isn’t ordinary; one of the most popular fillings is pheasant, and Mazza wants to experiment with other wild game.

“I’ve got some alligator meat, and I’d like to try lion and bear meat,” he said.

Mazza’s customers don’t expect to be disappointed by Mazza’s next creations.

“There’s nothing I don’t like about Pasta Mia,” said Theodor Krex, executive chef of the Warehouse restaurant in Santa Monica.