Febuary ? 1997

Wileys World Organic Pasta.

By Roberta Kent

It started as a small scale retail venture. Terry Wiley felt there was a strong local market for fresh organic pasta-products made with organic semolina and durum wheat and eggs from free range "uncaged" chickens.
He started small, sharing space with the Coffee Ware house in the shop next to The Beanery on Ashland Street. Then, he started serving lunches. As the business grew, Wiley took over the entire shop. The retail business added wholesale clients, picking up a regional natural food distributor. And, at the end of the summer, Wiley's World started staying open and serving dinners.
Wiley's World is small (five tables), cheerful and fragrant with garlic and tomato. The shop bustles with diners and customers picking up a prepared dinner or the ingredients to put one together quickly. The store is now open Monday through Friday, 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., and provides retail and wholesale pasta products as well as take-out and sit down prepared meals. Everything is fresh, organic and most items are made on the premises.
"This is a small, family run business, " Gina Lindow, kitchen manager and chef, explains. "Wileys has been doing most of the shopping on his own. We've only recently started to get deliveries. We close on weekends so we can be with our families."
The fresh pasta selection includes angel hair, linguine, spaghetti, fettucine, pappardelle or "house special" flavored noodles. The house sauces include roasted olive with basil and sun dried tomatoes, roasted garlic/gorgonzola, pesto, or feta / sun dried tomato/garlic/ artichoke hearts . All entrees are served with organic salad greens and focaccia bread made by Liberty Foods in Jacksonville. Wiley's own salad dressing, a "red onion / poppy seed vinaigrette" is also sold retail at the shop
"We try to cater to special diet. We are willing to substitute or modify. It's the nice thing about being small-scale," say Lindow. "We find a lot of customers like to call in their dinner order and pick up hot food on the way home."
Prices run from $5.25 to $6.25 on the menu with some daily specials running to $7.50. "Wiley is very careful about pricing. We want to be affordable.
The big success story has been the ravioli: cheese and spinach, chicken or smoked salmon ravioli. They were the beginning of Wiley's restaurant distribution and can be found at Gepetto's, Macaroni, Alex;s, Greenleaf and now at the Rogue Valley Country Club. The ravioli are not sold retail, but the other fresh pastas can be found at Cantwell's and the Ashland Co-op. Beardsley's Natural Foods, a wholesale distributor, has now placed the Wiley pasta selection in Albertson's Buy-Rite and the Medford Quality Market as well.
Chef Lindow, loves to come up with new products. "I've been experimenting with using roasted garlic and developed a roasted garlic / gorgonzola ravioli that has been a big success. We serve it with a marinara sauce."
Lindow has known Wiley for ten years - since they both worked at Gepetto's - and has a strong background in natural and organic foods, having worked at the farmers market and as a buyer at the Ashland Co-op. She is an Ashlander, born and bred. Wiley worked at Pastabilities before starting his own business.
Wiley's World serves a roasted vegetable minestrone soup prepared by Primavera, organic Peruvian coffee from The Good Bean Company in Jacksonville, and those incredible brownies from the Four and Twenty Blackbirds store next door. The carrot juice is "made fresh, while you wait" and there is an assortment of other organic juices along with hot chocolate, tea and sodas.