A new take-out pasta restaurant has opened in the West End with a build-your-own-bowl approach.

The Sauce Pasta Café (861 Denman Street) lets you pick your sauce and your pasta for a 32-ounce serving.

The noodle joint, which has a handful of seats for those who’d prefer to eat in, gets its name from the cooking style that owner Kathy Korcsok grew up with out east; her mom is French-Canadian.

“Everything we ate growing up had to have sauce, and everything had to be perfect,” says Korcsok, who now calls the West End home. “There’s a lot of great takeout places in Vancouver, but I wondered if you could get really good Italian food and take it out and walk down to Stanley Park or go to English Bay or watch the fireworks. It all started from there.”

The café offers eight types of sauce: Marinara (with tomatoes prepared three ways); arrabiata, which is a spicier tomato sauce with hot peppers; Alfredo (purely butter, cream, and cheese); creamy mushroom, which includes dried and wild mushrooms, such as porcini and lobster mushrooms, depending on what’s available; rosé; vodka cream with pancetta; pesto (made with basil, spinach, pine nuts, and parmesan); and, the best-seller, Nonna’s meat sauce. (The recipe comes from manager Richard Rowlands's mom and has heaps of garlic, onion, and dried and fresh herbs.)

To go with, pastas on offer include pappardelle and fettuccini (fresh) as well as penne, gemelli, rigatoni, and spaghetti. The dried pasta is made with bronzed durum, which is said to help the noodles hold onto the sauce (instead of it sliding to the bottom of the bowl). Gnocchi (made with 100-percent potato rather than a mix of potato and potato flakes) and four-cheese ravioli come from Port Moody’s Pasta d’Angelo.

All pastas cost $10.95, except for the marinara, which is $8.95.

There are daily specials ($12.95) as well. Recent examples include salmon and capers in a cream sauce with lemon and green onion; and butternut squash, spicy Italian sausage, apple, and crispy sage.

You can add on items like mushrooms, peas, or spinach (at no charge) or meatballs or chicken (for an additional $2). The eatery carries fresh focaccia and tiramisu as well.

The Sauce is open Monday to Thursday from 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Friday 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday 2 p.m. to 9 p.m.; and closed Sunday.