Garofalo pasta

There are movies where food has a starring role. And then there are times when eating is just another extra in the background. But when detail-minded Woody Allen shot his newest film, To Rome With Love, no morsel was left to chance.

As with any Italian-based film, eating looms large (that's what people do there, right?) So when the characters played by Jesse Eisenberg and Ellen Page decide to cook up something together, they head to the supermarket to shop for the main star of their meal: pasta.

What do they grab? Eschewing the industrially produced boxes of Barilla or Buitoni, they grab a big bag of Pasta Garofalo. Good choice.

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Flickr/nebulux76

a bowl of spaghetti

When one thinks of Switzerland, one conjures images of a happy, armed and yet war-adverse people who wear chic watches, carry fussy little knives and hike in majestic mountains while eating milk chocolate bars. (Hopefully we crammed every possible stereotype in to that one sentence.) Who knew they're also small scale producers of grove to table spaghetti? And who knew spaghetti was a crop at all?

But it is, and the Swiss do it right, according to a recently resurfaced, and totally excellent educational BBC video. Check it out after the jump.

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Anne Fishbein

Agnolotti-making at Drago Centro

Celestino Drago recently announced that Drago, the Santa Monica restaurant he opened 21 years ago, will close Jan. 31. "It was kind of a tough decision because it's like my baby," the Sicilian chef and restaurateur told the L.A. Times. "The restaurant did a lot for my career. But I've got my hands full with so much." Drago runs a catering business, the Dolce Forno bakery and several restaurants: Celestino, Enoteca Drago, Il Pastaio and Drago Centro.

So, don't worry. Unlike the pizzas, pastas and panini of the recently-closed Angeli Caffe, Drago's cooking is not disappearing any time soon.

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A. Scattergood

Evan Funke's tomato pasta

Making pasta at home isn't difficult. A handful of dough. An Atlas pasta machine. But if you're Rustic Canyon executive chef Evan Funke, who learned the art in Italy and is a Bologna certified chef sfoglino, you mix your pasta by hand, roll it out so thinly that you can see through it, and make the shapes in very specific ways. We recently spent the morning taking lots of pictures of Funke doing precisely that. Here's your pasta-making visual aid, in slideshow form.

Funke has lots of old pasta-making gadgets that he brought back from Italy, where he's pilgrimaging again later this month. He has cutters and presses, gnocchi boards and spring-loaded handmade ravioli stamps and a guitarra from Abruzzo. He has tortellini cutters and a beechwood pasta table (800€ shipping alone) and a birchwood rolling pin handmade for him because his wingspan is so wide. "It makes my job fun," said Funke in the cramped closet that is Rustic Canyon's kitchen. "The texture of hand-rolled pasta is completely different."

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Self-professed Pastafarian Niko Alm's driver's license.

Look closely at Niko Alm's driver's license. That's not a yarmulke on his head. That's a pasta strainer.

After a three-year battle, the 19-year-old Austrian man, a self-professed Pastafarian, has won the right to wear a colander on his head in his driver's license picture.

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Sure, we probably don't need another pasta cookbook. But The Glorious Pasta of Italy by Domenica Marchetti is pretty hard to pass up -- and we have a lot of Italian cookbooks in our library.

Marchetti grew up in New Jersey on handmade ravioli (her mother is from Abruzzo). And so she spends ample time telling us how to deal with everyday pasta dilemmas like making a basic egg dough. She recommends learning how to make it by hand to understand the process, then embracing the Cuisinart (our kind of woman).

Thus, the recipes for other dough variations here are told in Cuisinart-friendly lingo, though they hardly have that quick-fix boring taste. They include a pumpkin pasta dough, black pepper-parsley-Parmesan pasta, and one with saffron threads (dress simply with butter and Parmesan, or go all-out and serve it with lamb ragu). Turn the page.

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Despite what legions of new restaurants and food trucks would have you think, it takes a little more than just sticking something in a French roll to call it a fusion bánh mì, and throwing Indian food in a tortilla doesn't make it Mexican fusion. It seems like everyone with a pack of generic taco seasonings in their space (be it truck or kitchen) is claiming to be the inventor of some glorious new hybrid cuisine, but very few of them are. The Filipino juggernaut Jollibee, on the other hand, serves some of the most visible and widespread fusion dishes around, but makes not a single mention of that fact. Inspired by their quiet innovation, and despite the warnings of several wise associates, we decided to use Jollibee spaghetti for this week's food fight. In the other corner, we have a recognized expert of pasta, chef Gino Angelini's eponymous Osteria.

Turn the page for this week's food fight, a battle of mass appeal vs. critical acclaim, a global empire vs. a lone hero, Jollibee vs. Angelini Osteria.

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JGarbee

An Unfortunate Orecchiette Torpedo

For some, the never-ending grocery store debate involves which shortcut ingredients will actually mean getting dinner on the table at a reasonable hour. For us, there is but one question (okay, two, as olive oil is always involved): Is it worth it to shell out an additional $5+ for often expensive handmade dried pasta shells like orecchiette?

Full disclosure: We have perhaps an unwarranted bias against shell-shaped pastas of any kind. Not because we don't enjoy them when someone else is doing the cooking -- they are great for catching sauce -- but because shells don't seem to like us. Half the time we boil them (yes, in a huge pot of water with plenty of salt), they cling together so tightly we might as well be eating raw dough. Those little handmade ear-shaped orecchiette also tend to be pricey, and we prefer to keep from washing our money down the drain. But when we spied a box of imported orecchiette for $1.50 (!) at Trader Joe's recently, we grabbed it. Will this be our affordable shell-shaped pasta savior?

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C. LeVasser

Spaghetti al Limone at Terroni

Oftentimes when you go out to a restaurant, and particularly an Italian one, your brain will try to steer you toward some of the more unique menu items. You've gone out to eat, your brain will plead, so you should be ordering something, at least, with a little meat or heavy cream in it. As much as you may be craving a simple pizza margherita, or a penne marinara, your brain will tell you that an order like that is far too pedestrian. Your friend sitting next to you, after all, just ordered the night's special -- a massive bone-in rib eye, served with root vegetable mash, sautéed rapini, and pan drippings.

But while those dishes can, obviously, be quite exciting, sometimes simplicity is foolishly overlooked. It was a craving for simplicity, in fact, that lead us to Terroni's spaghetti al limone. Can most decent home cooks prepare a satisfying dish containing the basic ingredients of spaghetti, capers, spinach, onions, Parmesan, and lemon? Absolutely -- and they should. But they should also go to Terroni, and enjoy the version with homemade spaghetti; salty, earthy capers; likely far too much shaved Parmesan cheese; and enough lemon to turn an entire swordfish into carpaccio.

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Flickr user Sifu Renka

Scarpetta's spaghetti with tomato and basil

Spaghetti seems to elicit fairly strong opinions. Kids almost universally love it, while some adults seem to look down on it, as if it were a lower-class, or infantile pasta shape -- and far inferior to, say, pappardelle. But spaghetti, let's face it, is a pretty lovely thing. Scott Conant, the Scarpetta mastermind, and our recent interview subject, understands the merits of said pasta shape more than most. His hand-made spaghetti, served with tomato and basil, has made the rounds on a few different popular television shows.

Actually, in part 2 of our interview with Conant, the chef told us that his seventy-five-seat restaurant in New York served close to two-thousand portions of that very spaghetti last year. All that despite a price (twenty-four dollars) which some people seem to find outrageous. Regardless, it is damn fine spaghetti, and you can turn the page to see the recipe for yourself.

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