March 12, 2026
Mano Bella buys Capishe
New pizza concept for the Patrizi’s is “something I swore I would never do”
by TM Petaccia
For Madison and Raffaele Patrizi, their business path has been full of unintended expansions.
“The first thing I told my wife when we first started Mano Bella was we will never ever open a restaurant,” Raffaele Patrizi says. “I just want to do farmers markets and wholesale, selling pasta. Now after four years, we have three restaurants.”
In addition to its restaurants in SouthPark and The Market at 7th Street, last week the Patrizis closed on the current Capishe: Real Italian Kitchen on East Morehead Street which straddles the Dilworth, South End, and Uptown neighborhoods. True to their history, pizza is something else far removed from the couple’s initial plans.
“In America, the idea of pizza, it’s a lot,” Raffaele says. “Detroit-style, New York-style, small, large, whatever. I didn’t want to be in competition with that. I know my my art. I know Mano Bella’s potential. I know the real Italian food we serve, but with this opportunity and knowing who we are, I said, ‘Let’s try it’.”
Initially, the Patrizis were not looking for another restaurant, but a new place to house their pasta production. Last year, the company made over 180,000 pounds of fresh pasta for for their retail, wholesale, and restaurant needs. In addition to its own restaurant, Mano Bella pasta is sold to 35 restaurants and retail shops throughout the Carolinas.
“We were growing a lot and we needed more space,” Madison Patrizi says. “So we linked up with a broker and asked about a warehouse facility because so much of what we do is just production we make everything from scratch so we were looking for a place to help with that volume, but Capishe was the first thing he put across our desk. He called us and said, ‘You know this isn’t exactly what you guys were looking for but it might be a perfect fit.’ And we agreed. There’s just so much opportunity here.”
The pizzeria and trattoria space will also provide much-needed production capacity. Mano Bella plans to relocate its ravioli production to the Morehead Street location, while keeping the majority of its pasta production at 7th Street Public Market. “They have a dough room here at this location, which is really exciting,” Madison says.
Capishe will remain open while the Patrizis work through plans for the transition. Their tentative timeline calls for roughly three months before the new concept is unveiled. It won’t be Capishe or Mano Bella, but an entirely new brand. The concept will remain rooted in pizza and southern Italian cooking, but with a distinctly Mano Bella approach. The couple is working with Charlotte-based branding agency Made Outside to develop the new identity.
Some Capishe menu items will remain with newer or updated dishes to be added. One thing that will definitely change is the pizza flour. Like the semolina they buy for their pastas, the pizza flour will be sourced from Molino Paolo Mariani, a small, family-run mill in Italy’s Marche region operating since 1905. Unlike other Italian flours, which source wheat from North America and Australia and is milled in Italy, Mariani fully organic flours are sourced entirely from central Italy’s wheat belt.
“We already import more than 2,000 pounds of semolina every week for our pasta,” Raffaele says. “Three weeks ago, my wife and I went there and did an internship with them. We have flour on the boat coming right now.”
Mano Bella does a lot of sourcing from local farms for its dishes, and with Capishe, that now includes the North Carolina white oak for its all-wood fired ovens.
“There aren’t a lot of places in Charlotte that do strictly wood fire; many use a combination of wood and gas,” Madison says. “We’re 100% wood. There’s an art to that. A craft we’re excited to learn.”
Another change will be the addition of an Italian grocery in the new location, as found in both Mano Bella locations, offering Mano Bella pastas, sauces, fresh mozzarella, and a variety of take-home heat-and eat dishes along with a variety of imported Italian food items, plus wine and beer. A new addition will be take-home fresh pizza dough.
The Morehead restaurant has a full ABC permit and a full cocktail program is planned. Other possibilities includes using the rooftop space at Capishe’s 500 East Morehead building for pop-up events and classes.
“We are really excited,” Raffaele says. “We never did a step like this. Our other restaurants we’re built from scratch. This is the first time we bought an existing business. We’re excited to see how it goes from here.”
Madison adds, “With 7th Street and SouthPark, we’ve seen what doesn’t work and we’ve seen what works. We’re excited to apply those lessons to this operation, which has a lot of really positive attributes to it. I think there’s nothing but good things that are going to be coming out of this space.”
