A 2,000-Year-Old Menu Staple Is Peaking in 2020

After all, the various strands and shapes fashioned from a base of flour and water are celebrated worldwide—and have been since their earliest beginnings. Experts date pasta’s origins well before the legend of Marco Polo in the late 1200s, all the way back to at least 2,000 years ago during the Han dynasty.

Over the past 15 years or so, Americans have intensified their casual love affair with the stuff, whether it’s the ramen at Momofuku, the octopus and bone marrow fusilli at Marea in New York, or the brown butter ravioli at Cotogna in San Francisco. Last year alone, the U.S. market accounted for $6.3 billion in pasta and noodles, and that was just for dried varieties.

And yet, I would humbly argue that 2020 represents a new apex in the art of slurping.

New dishes are making inroads at restaurants where they’ve traditionally had little visibility. At the carb-scant Korean steakhouse Cote in New York, owner Simon Kim has installed a late-night special of ram-don, also known as chapaguri. The dish, popularized in the U.S. by the Best Picture-winning film Parasite, is based around thick instant noodles and stocked with chunks of steak.

Little-known shapes are getting their own micro-moment, too. At three-Michelin-star Manresa, noodle neophyte David Kinch is better known for his modern California cooking than Italian staples. But at his upcoming Mentone restaurant in Aptos, Calif., he will highlight pastas from the French and Italian Riviera such as corzetti, or stamped rounds. At Misi in Brooklyn, N.Y., chef Missy Robbins often dresses her corzetti with sungold tomatoes; Melissa Rodriguez, on the other hand, tops her version of it at New York’s Del Posto with buttery razor clams. Jonathan Benno is using it as a branding opportunity at his eponymous spot in Manhattan, where he adds a shrimp garnish to the oversize rounds that have been stamped with his initials.

Even classicist chefs are taking the opportunity to expand their boundaries. Stefano Secchi learned how to make gorgeous stuffed pastas from his former boss, Italy’s top-ranked chef Massimo Bottura. This year at Rezdora in New York, he is serving doppio tortelloni, which is a larger version of the thumb-size tortellini. It comes with two stuffing compartments instead of one, and fillings change based on the season: This spring, he’ll add one to the menu with prosciutto and Parmigiano cream.

At Monteverde in Chicago, Sarah Grueneberg has won a James Beard award for rethinking Italian pastas. Lately, though, she’s been gravitating toward zlikrofi from Slovenia. “I love the shape as it eats like a dumpling, soft pillows filled with cheese and potatoes,” she says. She serves them with house-made sauerkraut, pork jowl, potato, and fontina; it could double as a dumpling gratin.

On the ramen side, Foo Kanegae is best known for creating more than 600 kinds of noodle dishes when he ran the kitchen at the category-defining Ippudo in New York. In February he opened his own space in Brooklyn called Karazishi Botan, where the selections run much more unconventional: One bowl he’ll serve is made with gluten-free brown rice noodles and a broth that’s steamed in a commercial espresso machine to add a foamy texture. He calls it “Misopresso Botan-ical” ramen.

Fabio Trabocchi, another old-school master of the craft, sees diners who are open to well-considered noodle experimentation. At the three D.C.-area locations of his casual Italian spot Sfoglina Pasta House, he’s been rethinking the conventional makeup of popular dishes, adding grassy spirulina to his twisty, tubular garganelli and the ancient grain einkorn, the oldest cultivated wheat, to pappardelle for a toasty flavor. He’s committing what could be considered heresy back in his native Marche region in eastern Italy by making bucatini from chickpeas. It now anchors a dish of cacio e pepe.

Trabocchi has also been expanding his repertoire of handmade pastas that are pulled and stretched, a technique similar to the phenomenon of Chinese hand-pulled noodles. (For anyone who hasn’t been transfixed by the videos, cooks whip lengths of dough around until they’re transformed into thin, chewy ropes.)

At Sfoglina’s pasta-making classes at its Van Ness location, dough-rolling expert Simonetta Capotondo teaches the art of macceroni alla mugnia, a specialty of Abruzzo in central Italy; it starts with a single loop of pasta rolled and pulled by hand so it multiplies. There are now classes at Sfoglina on how to make su filindeu, a noodle typically reserved for a handful of people on the island of Sardinia and considered by some to be the most mysterious and rare pasta in the world. It is created from thick cords of dough that are rolled and pulled into 256 individual strands even thinner than angel hair. The name translates as “threads of God.”

But you don’t need to remember all that. Just keep these nine pastas on the tip of your tongue.

Shiso soba

Soba fanatics have been eagerly awaiting Sarashina Horii, a beloved Japanese chain, set to open in New York this spring. The noodles there are prized because they’re made from the core of buckwheat seeds, which makes them especially soft and delicate. Along with the pearly white original version, the restaurant will serve elegantly flavored ones made with ingredients such as shiso, yuzu, and black sesame.

Balsamic ribbons

What sounds like a 1980s power lunch fad is actually a new experiment from Fortunato Nicotra, executive chef at the venerable Felidia in New York. When he added balsamic to the dough, he discovered that the acidity created a very silky type of noodle. He serves them simply with butter and cheese to complement the sweet, tangy vinegar.

Lumache

The shell-shaped lumache—Italian for “snails”—does a hero’s job of holding sauce in its crevices. At the buzzy new da Toscano in New York, Eataly alum Michael Toscana makes his in-house and serves it with roasted tomato sauce and stracciatella cheese.

Busiate

The criminally underrated busiate resembles an extended corkscrew, also making it a superior choice for catching sauces. Chef Nick Accardi of New York’s Tavolino creates a version with tumminia flour, a stone-ground ancient grain native to Sicily. It pairs especially well with pesto.

Takasumen

These chewy ramen noodles are thicker than conventional ones—they look more like tagliatelle pasta than an Asian noodle. At Sanpoutei in New York, the strands are made downstairs daily with flours imported from Japan, then aged to lower moisture content so they can better absorb soup broth.

Campanelle

The ruffled cone design of campanelle means it’s especially good at grabbing and holding on to thick sauces. Chef Alfred Portale hand-makes the twists before tossing them with a duck ragu at his namesake Italian restaurant in New York.

Chili gigli

Gigli is another name for campanelle, which translates from the Italian as “lily.” At chef Jonathan Benno’s restaurant Leonelli Taberna, it’s flavored with Calabrian chile and pimenton (smoked paprika) and served fried as a bar snack. But Benno says gigli can do double duty in a more elaborate sauced dish because its beautiful shape is well-suited to high-end platings.

Spirulina garganelli

Fabio Trabocchi is expanding on classic shapes at his Sfoglina restaurants. Among his experiments is the natural additive spirulina, most often used as a booster for healthful juices and shakes. The algae adds beta carotene and a light herbal note to the pasta strands and tints them a pretty bluish-green color.

Chestnut maltagliati

The hard-to-pronounce shape translates as “badly cut” in Italian and was originally made from scraps of leftover tagliatelle. Key to it are the uneven edges and sizes. Trabocchi dresses his up by folding chestnut powder into the dough for a woodsy, hearty sweetness.

A Fashionable Feast

Pasta maker Pastificio G. Di Martino has built a reputation for a robust wheaty taste and chew. Although revered in Italy—the 100-plus-year-old company is d at more than $200 million—it’s probably best known abroad for a collaboration with fashion duo Dolce & Gabbana, which resulted in brightly illustrated packages and a Christmas window takeover at Harrods in London.

What started in 2017 as a limited-edition product that sounded like a joke—clothing designers selling gown-busting carbs—has helped propel the company’s expansion. This month, Di Martino, which has a handful of stores in Italy, will open its first U.S. location, La Devozione, in New York’s Chelsea Market. The store will stock all 126 of the brand’s shapes, including seven kinds of spaghetti in a range of thicknesses. The selection will also include new-to-market designs such as ribbon-shaped fresine and tubular elicoidali, as well as what founder and Chief Executive Officer Guiseppe Di Martino calls “party shapes,” like the spiral trottole. Eventually the space will include a 48-seat pasta bar serving broken candele tubes with Neapolitan ragu as well as its take on spaghetti al pomodoro, also known as la devozione—hence the name. Bags of pasta start at $5; D&G’s collectible tins go for $160.

The Tableside Treatment

Even as experimentation runs rampant through the world of pasta, you’d think some time-honored recipes would be stubbornly immune to change. A shallow bowl of pasta carbonara is one such example: The mixture of spaghetti, coated with egg yolk and Parmigiano with tiny chunks of glistening guanciale (cured pork jowl), is a balancing act best handled by the chef behind the pot in the kitchen.

But thanks in part to social media, eternal dishes such as carbonara are becoming tableside attractions. At Peasant in New York, Marc Forgione shakes the components in an oversize Mason jar at the table, then transfers it to plates. The chef says the origins are practical: He came up with the idea at a dinner for 1,400, where it was the easiest way to serve hot, freshly tossed pasta. “Turns out people loved it, so I figured we could do it for single servings as well,” he says.

Performative affectations extend to ramen, too. At Brooklyn’s Karazishi Botan, chef Foo Kanegae credits superhero comics from American pop culture as the inspiration for his porcini-based Captain Brooklyn ramen, which is finished with a ladle of sizzling hot oil. To protect diners at the counter from spattering oil, he gives them a Captain America-style “shield”—sure to delight both children and adult-size kids.

The most dynamic of the new tableside-service pastas is undoubtedly the “noodle dance” at the recently opened Haidilao in Flushing, N.Y. The Chinese hot pot chain is already known for its free hand massages for waiting customers. But most viral of all are the servers who hand-pull noodles tableside, whipping lengths of dough overhead and behind their back to a pop music score in the background. It’s a made-for-smartphone-video moment that puts even flaming Baked Alaska to shame.

The Gluten-Free Option

Pasta made from chickpeas could double as a Rorschach test. Gluten-free diners see it as an opportunity to eat a beloved food they were formerly denied; purists regard it as a mealy-textured affront to wheat.

The increased demand for gluten-free products—the market is projected to be $15 billion by 2026—has made the rise of chickpea pasta inevitable. At Electric Lemon, which advertises “clean cuisine” in New York’s Equinox Hotel, it is one of the most popular dishes when it’s on the menu. And for home cooks, the biggest name is Banza, which has expanded its line to 16 shapes, with plans to create more. It’s now not only the fastest-growing legume-based pasta, but also the fastest-growing pasta category overall, period, at Whole Foods and Target.

Even traditionalists such as Fabio Trabocchi are coming around at least partly to the idea. At Sfoglina, he makes his by grinding, then drying protein-rich chickpeas in the oven to make flour. But he cheats just enough: To make the noodles more pliable, Trabocchi adds semolina, which means they’re not really gluten-free.

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