With modern diners craving novelty and adventure, delving into the depths of Italy’s regional diversity offers restaurants the chance to offer something new without reinventing the wheel.
Chefs at upscale eateries can tap into centuries-old techniques and less familiar culinary traditions to deliver memorable pasta dishes.
“There’s been a huge uptick in the variety of pasta shapes over the last 10 years or so,” says Mark Bolchoz, culinary director of Italian concepts at The Indigo Road Hospitality Group. “A lot of them have been around for centuries and are now becoming popular because people are digging deeper and doing more research.”
Bolchoz manages culinary programming for all of Indigo Road’s Italian restaurants, overseeing the menus at both Indaco and Colletta, two growing chains known for their locally sourced ingredients and selection of fresh pastas.
Offering only handmade pastas allows chefs to control every aspect of the process, including selecting the best flour and eggs from local suppliers and controlling the humidity to get the perfect texture and consistency. From a creative aspect, it gives them the ability to flavor and color their creations using vegetable purees.
“That plays into a dish when things get a little monochromatic,” Bolchoz says. “Being able to flavor our own pasta with spinach or collard greens that we powdered or pureed and worked into the dough, being able to have that added pop of green in the dead of winter—that’s really important for us.”
Each team runs their own menus, but the loose formula is for every restaurant to have an even mix of stuffed, short pastas, and long options. Different sauces go with different shapes of pasta, so if the offerings skew too heavily toward one of those categories, chefs can back themselves into a corner when it comes to the types of sauces they can offer.
Bolchoz and his teams at Indaco and Colletta pull from various regions throughout Italy when developing new menu items. A favorite across Indaco locations is scarpinocc, which hails from northern Italy and features an indentation in the middle for catching sauce.
The restaurants tend to stick pretty close to their source material, but Indaco in particular has some elements of Southern flare sprinkled throughout the menu. Bolchoz points to agnolotti summer corn as an example. The seasonal best-seller combines elements of Southern-style creamed corn with a stuffed pasta from Italy’s Piedmont region.
Michael’s on Naples, an upscale restaurant in Long Beach, California, offers a similarly extensive array of pasta shapes, all prepared in house daily with fresh dough. Whether it’s fluffy gnocchi with tender short rib; pappardelle with white wine, squash, and goat cheese; or mezzaluna filled with duck neck and ricotta, executive chef Eric Samaniego aims for authenticity and specificity when putting together his dishes.
Determining which shapes make it on the menu is mostly a matter of logistics. Since the pasta is made each morning, Samaniego has to consider what his team can accomplish in a limited amount of time.
“It can’t just be all of these really small, intricately folded pastas with different fillings,” he says. “There’s usually one or two of those, so we can show off our skills. There’s always an extruded pasta, like spaghetti or bucatini, that can be produced a bit faster, and then there’s always a hand-cut pasta, like tagliatelle or pappardelle.”
Italian cuisine is hyper regional, which means there’s never a shortage of lesser-known options to explore, he adds.
“I love following old recipes, then finding out how things were done years ago, and then trying to replicate that,” Samaniego says. “We try to balance those classical dishes, traditional techniques and simplicity in the ingredients with newer flavor combinations that are a bit more contemporary.”
Michael’s on Naples has a daily pasta tasting menu that is regularly updated with new dishes. That’s where Samaniego and his team push the envelope and bring in a California twist. He points to a girasole pasta dish as an example. Filled with shrimp and spicy Calabrian sausage, the pasta takes its name from the Italian word for sunflower, thanks to its crimped, folded edges.
“I wanted to make it special and different from a ravioli or a tortellini,” Samaniego says. “Dumplings and tortellini are kind of similar, so I started thinking about dim sum. Then, I started thinking about shumai, where you steam the dumpling and see the filling out of the top. It still has those crimped edges with the filling in the middle, but it’s not completely encased in dough. Now, we have a steamed dumpling on a pasta tasting menu, and it fits right into place. It’s still a tie-in to pasta. It’s still made with Italian ingredients. It’s not quite fusion cooking, but it’s definitely flirting with that line a bit.”
While he’s found success blending tradition with contemporary touches, the chef is a firm believer that time-honored, rustic recipes can be equally memorable. He encourages chefs not to overthink their dishes and let the ingredients shine.
“There’s beauty in simplicity, and you can get lost trying to elevate it too high,” Samaniego says. “The right ingredients, the right technique to make the pasta, and the final presentation will always elevate any dish.”
