(dramatic music)
- Cooking to me is just something I fell in love
with the first time I stepped in a professional kitchen.
When you're in Italy, life revolves
around the dining room table.
I just really wanted to recapture those moments
that I had growing up.
I'm Chef Steve Samson from Rossoblu Restaurant
in the Fashion District, downtown Los Angeles.
The style of cooking here at Rossoblu
is very traditionally Bolognese.
Bologna was my kind of second hometown,
Los Angeles my original hometown, I grew up here.
Rossoblu is actually the nickname of the soccer team
in Bologna because that's their two colors,
so they're called the Rossoblu.
We made the decision that Rossoblu wasn't gonna
be my interpretation of classical Italian dishes,
it was trying to bring the classical dishes here.
I'm not really trying to reinvent anything,
I'm not trying to make any kind of any artistic statements
in the food, I just really wanna deliver those
smells and flavors that I had as a child.
I would go spend my summers there with my grandparents
and my Nonna would make the pasta every morning
when we'd go up to the mountains, my Nonna would cook,
grill over an open fire.
After cooking professionally for like 15 years,
I finally realized that that's the kind
of food that I wanted to cook.
We roll out all our pasta here like my Nonna used to
with a rolling pin, we don't use any pasta machines.
I brought a guy, Francesco, over from Bologna,
he's here, he makes all our pasta at the restaurant.
Really the difference between an Italian making pasta
and some American chefs making pasta is the pasta
should be the star of the show, it's not about garnishes,
it's not about anything, it's just about
the beautiful noodle cooked just to the right amount.
A few of the recipes here are actually straight up
my mom's or my grandmother's recipe.
The Minestro Nel Saco in particular, is my mom's recipe.
I did not changed it at all.
This is the Minestro Nel Saco which literally
translates to soup in a bag.
The flavors are very specifically Bolognese.
We really use great parmesan reggiano, flour,
eggs and a little bit of butter and with that
we make a pasta, basically.
That goes into cheesecloth which we then tie up.
We cook it whole and it ends up kinda like a big ball
that then gets cut up into little squares and the little
squares we have these linen, muslin bags that we
serve them in and the bags just sit in the broth,
the broth is made with beef neck bones and chicken bones
and chicken feet so it's a really flavorful broth
that we actually throw all the parmesan rinds in
as well to give it that really rich flavor
and when it's ordered, we just pull out the bag,
put it in the bowl and then pull it off at the table.
It's kind of like Italian matzo ball soup.
It's really delicious.
Very simple but kinda elegant at the same time.
Soon as I saw this building and the surrounding
buildings of City Market South,
I knew it was the perfect fit.
Kinda had an indoor, outdoor feel, very representative
of what's going on now in downtown L.A. but also
can almost be like a piazza in Bologna.
When guests come in here they shouldn't feel like
they're going to a you know, another restaurant,
it should feel very much like they're going to
somebody's home, eating that kind of home style food
that you would get in Bologna or Amelia Romana
but just here in Los Angeles.
I think the biggest compliment somebody could pay me
after they've had a meal here would be,
you know, that's just like my grandmother used to make
and she's from Ferrara or Bologna, so that's really
what we're trying to deliver with the food here.
(soft music)