World Pasta Day This Sunday: Get Out Your Pasta Maker, or Let Gino Angelini Make Your Agnolotti For You

For anyone currently eating a bowlful of pasta for breakfast, remnants of dinner last night at Drago Centro or Angelini Osteria; if you're getting amatriciana sauce all over your brand new copy of The Silver Spoon: Pasta book (out last week from Phaidon Press); or if you're just eyeing your Atlas pasta maker, as you do every day, take note. This Sunday is World Pasta Day.

Why Sunday? Not because you'd have the whole day to pray over your Atlas, perhaps, or to make and roll out and form all those little shapes by hand, or to get over to a nice Italian restaurant without suffering through LA traffic. But because the World Pasta Congress decided that the day should be celebrated then, to honor the Pasta Congress held in Rome on 25th October, 1995. They're Italians. They can decide what they want.

You may of course celebrate the event as you choose. According to the Congress, "every country celebrates World Pasta Day in absolute autonomy, while respecting a global strategy." In other words, when in Rome. When in Los Angeles, you could do worse than to head over to Gino Angelini's Minestraio Trattoria (formerly La Terza), where they have a whole pasta menu, and a pasta tasting plate, comprised of three kinds of sauced pasta for $19. Here's what it looked like this past Monday night, ordered at the pretty marble-top bar. Left to right: ravioli, agnolotti and strozzapreti. If you've got excellent agnolotti, every day is pasta day.

A. Scattergood

pasta tasting at Minestraio