- I've been thinking about it for a while
and trying to figure out a way to
make al dente pasta fast enough
to translate to this sort of fast-food environment.
I had always wanted to do more affordable,
more accessible food in my career.
It's almost an accident that I ended up in fine dining.
Before opening Pasta Flyer,
I was the executive chef at a restaurant called Del Posto,
which was a fine dining restaurant.
There's no reason why the rest of the population
shouldn't also have access
to good, affordable, healthy food.
After working in fine dining for a number of decades,
it just became more evident to me
that my future should involve trying to serve more people.
Similar to many of the fast-casual restaurants,
we're buying whole, real food
and preparing it on premises
with slow food ideology,
and it's really only our service line that is fast.
Everything that we serve here
was very deliberately chosen.
We spent time trying to marry a certain shape
with a sauce that we felt intrinsically went well together.
Part of the secret is that we have forged relationships
with really high quality artisanal pasta producers in Italy.
We buy containers from them and have them sent to us frozen,
so all of our pasta is cooked in only 15 seconds
and able to retain a really high level of al dente texture.
The sauces are hot held,
so the first thing the person on the cooking side does
is place the chosen pasta into a pan
onto an induction burner
and starts to bring it up to temperature,
and then the two are tossed for a moment
and then plated into a bowl.
When it's done well,
the process should only take about 30 or 40 seconds.
I'm really into this whole grain rigatoni
made with nonna's meat ragu,
which is sort of like a Bolognese sauce
but more influenced by the region of Tuscany, maybe,
than Emilia-Romagna,
because it has red wine, and rosemary,
and porcini mushrooms.
So it's a little, sort of, like, richer
and more fully flavored than a traditional Bolognese sauce.
We have a pesto sauce that's made from basil.
It's very traditional from Genoa,
utilizing only five ingredients:
so it's basil, pine nuts, garlic,
olive oil, and Parmesan cheese.
There's really no mystery there,
but we do make it every day;
it's really fresh, it's really bright.
We have a fettuccine Alfredo,
which is a traditional dish from Rome
that was created at a restaurant called Alfredo's of Rome.
It's sort of like macaroni & cheese.
We have spaghetti and meatballs.
It's a marinara sauce made from plum tomatoes from Campania.
Because we have such a small and really focused menu,
it's only about 10 items,
we've had the luxury of going really deep down
the rabbit hole on some of these preparations,
which has been really rewarding.
When I was a young, impressionable adolescent,
I found myself working in Italian,
sort of mom-and-pop restaurants.
I don't have any Italian heritage,
and I feel like when you're young
and your filters are open,
those first influences really resonate deeply with you,
so although I went and cooked
other types of cuisine throughout my career,
I was always drawn back to Italian food.
It's where I belong.
Everyone's sort of like looking for the next thing,
and there's a lot of problems
with the restaurant industry right now.
The system is flawed, and in many cases broken,
and everybody's trying to figure out
what the next access point to the general public
is gonna ultimately be,
and this is certainly one path.
Fast food, historically,
has sort of this negative connotation,
but there's no reason why affordable food
can't be also healthy food.