North Italia opens 50th restaurant at Brea Mall, handmade pasta remains core
North Italia chose Brea Mall for its 50th restaurant, giving Orange County a polished pasta stop built on handmade pasta, scratch-made sauces and hand-tossed pizza.
North Italia hit a major milestone with its 50th restaurant at Brea Mall, and the opening gives Orange County diners a new high-visibility home for the brand’s handmade pasta playbook. The Brea location, at 1500 Brea Mall, Suite 1501, is now open for lunch, happy hour, dinner and weekend brunch, a mix that fits both the mall’s daytime traffic and its evening crowd.
The opening matters beyond the ribbon-cutting because Brea Mall keeps sharpening its food strategy around restaurants that can do more than feed shoppers quickly. North Italia brings a sit-down format with enough range to pull in lunch guests, after-work diners and weekend brunch regulars, while also giving the center another anchor that can extend dwell time and keep traffic moving outside the traditional shopping window. It is North Italia’s second Orange County restaurant, joining Irvine, and the move underscores how the brand is using familiar dining rooms to deepen its Southern California footprint.
For pasta fans, the draw is still the same formula that helped the chain grow from four locations when chef Chris Curtiss first joined the brand into a nationwide operation. North Italia says its food is made from scratch daily, with homemade pasta made daily and hand-tossed pizzas on the menu. The company also says it sources ingredients from Italy and keeps vendor relationships that support the quality of its food, part of the reason the concept has stayed positioned above many fast-casual Italian competitors even as it has scaled.
North Italia was founded in Arizona in 2002 on two principles, exceptional Italian cuisine and great hospitality, and those ideas still shape the brand as it operates under The Cheesecake Factory, Inc. Curtiss, now listed publicly as Corporate Chef and Director of Culinary R&D, helped define the chain’s early identity, giving the growth story a culinary through line instead of a purely corporate one. At 50 restaurants, North Italia has turned handmade pasta into a national growth engine, and Brea is now part of that bigger test: whether polished chain Italian can keep winning by feeling scratch-made, not standardized.
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