At Todd English’s pasta annex at the Plaza Food Hall, fresh pasta hangs behind the counter, where diners can watch it being made. (Michael Sofronski)
The fusilli with sausage and red swiss chard is one of the many homemade pastas offered at Tommy Lasagna. (Tamara Beckwith)
On a quiet corner in Alphabet City, Blanca Rincon is busy at work, deftly transforming balls of dough into delicate, double-hued strands of squid ink and durum flour tagliolini, mushroom-filled ravioli triangles and whatever else is on tonight’s pasta fresca menu at Spina (175 Avenue B).
While fresh pasta is nothing new in the city’s restaurant scene, what makes Rincon’s work noteworthy is its performance value. Instead of sequestering the pasta chef in an anonymous station behind the kitchen door, Spina’s owners decided to dedicate valuable space in the 1,100-square-foot dining room to showcase their pasta preparation.
“One of our main goals was to make something unique, to make this a pasta bar,” says general manager Salvatore Rappo. “It’s pasta to table.”
And the trend has started to boil over.
For Todd English, who opened a pasta annex in his Plaza Food Hall (1 W. 59th St.) last November, the new addition is a dream come true. “Many moons ago, I was working in Italy, and one of my favorite experiences was working with the ladies who made pasta: No recipes, all technique,” the celeb-chef says.
“People stand here and are mesmerized,” he adds, waving his hand at the wide-open marble counter where 350 to 400 pasta dishes — from saffron-tinted tagliatelle to brick oven lasagna — are prepared on an average day. Against the back wall is a muted rainbow assortment of pasta, hanging on racks to dry. “The theatrics, that’s what this whole place is about.”
At the more utilitarian fresh pasta station inside Eataly (200 Fifth Ave.), customers can also observe exactly how the roughly 4,000 pounds of pasta are crafted every week. They sell a wide variety directly at the counter and try to reflect various regions in Italy as authentically as possible. A modified selection is also offered on menus of three Eataly restaurants and occasionally featured on chef Mario Batali’s ABC daytime talk show “The Chew.”
“It ends up being like a spectator sport,” says their pasta chef Ron Palladino. “We’re like animals in a zoo. It’s flattering, really — how many people want to watch other people working. It seems almost every day we have people asking us where we got our equipment, because they want to do it themselves — they want to open their own fresh pasta business.”
On a recent Saturday afternoon at family-friendly Oh My Pasta (142 Montague St., Brooklyn), a large, state-of-the-art stainless-steel machine entrances a young diner as it churns out cylindrical cavatelli shapes. Manager Marco Lasala says his machines can produce at least one ton of pasta a day, though for now, it’s more important he sticks as close to his native Pugliese cuisine as possible.
However, when it comes to authenticity, it doesn’t get much more real than Gradisca’s (126 W. 13th St) in-house pasta maker Caterina Schenardi: She is owner Massimo Galeano’s mother, who learned her skills a half-century ago from her own mom in her northern Italian hometown of Piacenza. Nowadays, “Mama,” as she goes by, comes for extended stays and works front-of-house, wearing hot-pink, plastic loafers while meticulously handcrafting tortellini and slicing sheets of pasta into perfect strands of green and white tagliatelle.
And later this spring, Italian pasta mega-brand, Giovanni Rana, will open Giovanni Rana Pasta Kitchen, a fine-dining restaurant in Chelsea Market, featuring an open pasta bar.
But is house-made pasta really worth the pomp?
Spina’s executive chef Jeremy Personius says yes. “The sauces are absorbed far better in fresh pasta than dry pasta.” Currently, his top seller is the orecchiette, which are carved from a thick strand of dough, then sautéed with a rich, savory mixture of braised lamb shanks and broccoli rabe.
“It’s a whole different sensation — a smoother, silkier finish with a much cleaner taste,” says Eataly’s Palladino.
“Boxed pasta is usually harder and has a different flavor,” says chef Thomas Mosera of Gramercy’s Tommy Lasagna (119 E. 18th St.), which opened last October and features a curved bar where you can usually catch the pasta handiwork during lunch hours. “It has to have preservatives and you can taste it.Fresh pasta is not always going to be uniform like when you get a boxed pasta. I don’t mind because you can see it’d a homemade product.”
“Mama” Caterina Schenardi hand-makes pasta in the dining room at Gradisca.