This is the old fashioned way that we used to do when my dad showed us how to make pasta,
and we made the pasta early in the morning and spread it out with a big towel so it would
dry out and then we would wait until later when it was time for dinner and, uh, we’d
have our pasta.
Homemade pasta.
Pasta has always been a passion of mine,
It’s comforting.
It’s uniquely Italian even though there’s noodles in every single culture pretty much.
It’s kind of like what brings the Italian table together.
And it’s a big part of what we do here.
But I think that just having a family that was always around each other and always using
food as that vehicle for communication and hanging out, it made it really important to me.
A lot of Sundays we would get together and we would always say to our parents, “Well
holidays…”
and my parents would be like “It’s not a holiday this is just your family getting
together.”
And we used to sit down, eat pasta, and then get up and hang out with each other for a
little bit.
And then sit back down and that’s when we had, like, the normal meal that most families
would just sit down just for that meal.
So when I knew I wanted to open a restaurant, I’ve always wanted it to be Italian.
It’s the food that I ate growing up and it’s the food I’m passionate about it’s
the culture I’m passionate about.
When Kevin O’Donnell, who’s my co-chef, and myself open this restaurant one of the
things you want to do is be the best at making pasta and so we’ve invested the infrastructure
to be able to make a unique style of pasta here with the mill that we have downstairs,
sifting the flower.
It’s kind of like the number one focus for me.
There’s a huge difference between homemade pasta and
what comes out of a box.
We can control flavor profile of how much rye we want or how much durum we want.
We can control texture, how much bounce we want, how much snap we want.
Ultimately we can control where the berry comes from and who’s farming it, and how
we’re getting it.
The creative process of a restaurant is like every second of your day, there’s time where
you can tune it out but you’re always just aware of every book that you pick up or every
time you go out to eat there’s always inspiration.
There’s traveling, there’s going to other cities.
What Kevin and I do is we take all those experiences and then we filter it through an Italian point
of view.
At the end of it all, every dish that comes up is your idea that you get to pass forward
into the restaurant.
The food at the restaurant includes stuff that’s traditionally known in Italian like
Cicchetti.
We also have your more traditional things of meat, and fish, and vegetables.
But from a production standpoint and also from where it lies in our hearts, pasta has
the most square footage of any space in the restaurant, and holds the biggest section
on the menu.
The pasta is the last thing that comes to your table before desert and it’s kind of
like, “Here it is, here’s the showcase.”
So this dish is called Pasta allo Scoglio, which means “things that cling to the rock”.
It’s traditionally found in a lot of the coastal cities of Italy.
I think seafood is beautiful because it just kind of has its own natural flavor that you
can’t recreate.
The shrimp are sweet, the flames are a little bit salty, the snails kind of give a different
texture as well as like a meatiness to the dish.
And traditionally it would just be garlic, tomato sauce, some white wine.
Kind of like your stereotypical base for Italian cooking with seafood, we’re going to make
some changes to it.
We’re going to use scallions in addition to garlic and then we’re going to use the
tomato in a much smaller capacity and kind of make it more of a butter based sauce.
We will use white wine to steam the fish but we’re going to use Vermouth in our sauce.
The hard thing to do is to get the intensity of all the individual ingredients to stand
out so it’s not just like this mass mix of food together.
And then to round it out with balance and so you’re looking for something to be a
little bit sweet, a little bit salty, a little bit bitter, a little bit sour,
and then you kind of build the other textures and other things that go into it that kind
of complete the dish from a guest point of view.
Service please.
207 Cappellacci.
Kale salad bread for two, 107.
Make that two cheese plates, David.
And then can you go ten minutes on a Garganelli lumache.”
Being a chef is super cool because it’s a job that doesn’t get stale.
And not only can I be creative but I get to evolve.
Yeah, professionally I feed people for a living but it’s not just about feeding people.
I read this once that there’s a level of insecurity kind of with all chefs that they
want their food to be—someone to accept it, it can’t just be like “I made this
so I’m happy with that.”
Because if I felt like that maybe I would just cook at home, but it’s really about
me making it and knowing that it’s being accepted on the other end is somewhat like
comforting for me.
You know when you think about feeding people, it’s super exciting to think that people
come in to your restaurant, specifically to eat your food.
It’s just that little bit that pushes us over the edge where someones like “That
food was so worth it.”
That’s why I think this restaurant is really special to me.
I don’t have machines like you have Michael at the restaurant so I’m not so up on it
like you are.
I wish I had it but I’m too old for that now.
You’re gonna have pasta for Christmas.
We’re gonna have enough for Easter.