“People have a preconceived idea that Italian food is inexpensive.
But I have ten to twelve pasta makers working for me; I spend a
fortune making fresh pasta. And yes, it’s entirely worth it.”
Earlier, in fact, White’s chef de cuisine, Bill Dorrier, toured me
around the new restaurant facility, including a room downstairs
where two men stood side by side constructing various pasta
shapes. With them, Dorrier showed me how to roll my own
garganelli using a dowel and a lined board. The care and intricacy it
required comes back to me as White serves me that same garganelli,
this time coated in a sauce made with cream and speck (a kind of
smoked prosciutto).
“Boom!” cheers White as he adds grated Parmesan. We both
take a taste and the next word he exclaims makes lots of sense in
the moment: “SEX!”
The smokiness of the sauce is intense, but the star of the show
is definitely the pasta itself. “With fresh pasta, you have
something you really worked on,” he says as he moves on to the
next dish. “And it’s that much more meaningful.”
The next dish is a tortellini (house-made, of course) in a meaty
ragù infused with cream. His final dish is made with mussels and
beans using a pasta, creste de gallo (it means the crest of a rooster
because it’s shaped like a coxcomb), that he extrudes from a
machine. He adds sliced garlic to a pan with olive oil. “Each piece
of garlic is exactly the same thickness,” he says, explaining how
minced garlic doesn’t give you any control over the end result.
Here he’s entirely in control (and recommends using a mandoline