- [Anthony Lombardo] I grew up eating
Italian-American red sauce and big bowls of penne Bolognese,
garlic bread, chicken Parmigiano.
These are staple dishes, nothing wrong
with any of these dishes.
But it's not a good representation
of what I saw and learned in my travels in Italy.
Italian food is a little bit more refined,
when it comes to the pasta dishes.
It's not just garlicky tomato sauce.
We wanted to be a restaurant in metro Detroit
that Detroiters aren't necessarily used to,
as far as Italian food goes.
We wanted to really push the boundaries
of being contemporary and Italian at the same time.
Modern Rome is diverse cuisine to me.
But, that's just kind of the inspiration to SheWolf.
A lot of chefs from Rome have traveled,
been all over Europe, spent time in Japan,
and they're bringing a lot of their knowledge
back to Rome with them and cooking with it.
So, Roman cuisine is expanding, as far as
the amount of ingredients and techniques that you're seeing.
But there's staple dishes that just won't change.
A lot of the dishes on our menu
are just straight up chef-driven dishes
using Italian ingredients,
and stuff that I've seen in my travels.
But you do have the four staple Roman pastas on the menu.
Cacio e pepe became very trendy
based on its simplicity and simple flavors.
Cacio e pepe becomes almost like saying "pumpkin spice."
It's really hard to over-chef cacio e pepe.
It's simple in its purest form.
Freshly cracked black pepper in a pan with some olive oil,
and let it get nice and toasty.
Once your pepper starts to really get toasted,
you're going to hit it with a dash of pasta water,
a touch of butter, and make your pan sauce.
Then the pasta comes out of the water,
goes into the peppery butter sauce.
You give it a toss, you add your pecorino cheese,
and you keep coating it, and that's it.
It's pretty simple: butter, cheese, pepper.
Last summer I was in Rome, I ate carbonara maybe 50 times.
You know, "research."
Once you add guanciale to cacio e pepe,
you basically have a pasta called la gricia.
If you add a little bit of egg, you have a pasta carbonara.
They all have very similar ingredients,
and they're all very Roman.
The first time I had pasta carbonara,
I was a young cook, about 18, working at a restaurant.
And the chef that I was working
had some leftover breakfast sausage and some peas,
so he made a very false representation of carbonara.
But that's when I realized it's delicious.
We make a zabaglione, which is a way
of incorporating the eggs into it
and keeping it light and fluffy.
So, we take our guanciale,
we cook it down to get all the fat out of it,
crisp up that guanciale.
We take that guanciale fat and we put it in a bowl
with pecorino cheese, white wine, and eggs yolks.
And we whip over a double boiler.
A savory guanciale fat, egg, cheesy zabaglione.
And once that's nice and fluffy,
we'll charge it, add it to an ISI container,
and add even more air to it.
And then, boil your pasta,
add it to the crispy guanciale,
give it a nice coat.
Pasta water and guanciale fat are coating your noodles.
Then you add your zabaglione, fold it in nice.
And that's the basic rundown of our carbonara.
We wanted to do a baked pasta al forno.
Stuffed shells are kind of a big Italian-American tradition.
Stuffed shells, almost like lasagna,
baked in a casserole dish,
scoop it out.
I have fond memories of eating that growing up
in an Italian-American community here in metro Detroit.
And we wanted to do like a seafood version.
We take the octopus Bolognese
and we mix it with our bechamel,
add a little bit of fat to it.
And we pipe it inside the stuffed shells.
Then we brush a little bechamel on top and bake it.
Once it gets those nice, crispy outside edges,
kinda like lasagna,
everybody knows that best part of baked pasta
is the crispy, burnt edges.
We hit it on the plate and we garnish it with our blush sauce
and we top it with a little pine nut gremolata,
which adds some texture, and some bread crumbs,
a little bit of lemon for a little bit of freshness
to the dish.
This is not something you're gonna see in Italy per se.
Alla Bolognese means "from Bologna,"
which is a land-locked city.
Our Bolognese is made with octopus,
hence, you would never seen it in Bologna.
It's one of those dishes where Italians come in,
eat it, and then yell at me
because Italians, you know how Italians are.
I've worked in restaurants where we've done
contemporary American food,
but Italian food is my heart and my soul and I love it.
I'm not a very well-rounded chef, I will say that.
I am not a well-rounded ingredient chef.
I'm very Italian in that aspect.
I'm not closed-minded.
I love all cuisines, but when it comes to cooking it,
when I'm forced to be creative,
I very much lean on the Italian experience that I've gained.
I hope I'm always cooking Italian food.
It's my favorite thing to do
and there's a lot of different types out there.
It's not just pastas.
I hope to always be creative.
You can open 20 Italian restaurants
in Detroit based on every region
and 1,500 different menu items that are not alike.