Pasta, Baby

When I came to New York, I fell in love with the city, and I fell in love with making pasta. I was no stranger to eating pasta, of course, but the pasta I had eaten at home growing up was, I came to realize, a completely different category of pasta: rustic, soulful, always satisfying, but not exacting. Preparing it was something you did, not something you thought about. The kitchens I worked in when I first came to New York changed all of that.

At San Domenico, where I held my first restaurant position in New York, I was exposed to a level of finesse and artfulness in the preparation of pasta that had, quite frankly, never occurred to me before. It wasn’t pretentious; on the contrary, the thoughtfulness and precision of the chefs I worked under amplified pasta’s inherent and beautiful simplicity. They didn’t overdo it with luxury ingredients but honored this universal category of food by instead taking into account its every nuance: how each type of pasta, particular shape, and dough composition should inform what it is prepared with. This approach resonated with me immediately, and I studied their every move. Eventually I became the first American to head up the pasta station there, and pasta became (and remains) the category of food that is closest to my heart, even (or especially) now that I’ve come full circle and returned to cooking it regularly at home for my own family.