San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Let’s talk about Italian food
How pasta, of all shapes and sizes, came to rule the Bay Area.
The pasta section of Rich Table’s new cookbook starts with a straightforward recipe, at least in San Francisco terms, for tajarin with trout roe and ramps. (You know, pantry staples.) Then, with each page, the pastas get progressively less familiar: pappardelle with clams, duck fat and bay leaf powder; bucatini with pork belly, watermelon and green coriander; aged-duck lasagna with Santa Rosa plums and cress.
Anyone who’s eaten at the Hayes Valley restaurant knows co-chefs Evan and Sarah Rich can pull off all these combinations, but the recipes are also a perfect example of how Bay Area chefs have become the country’s great pasta rebels.
Where other cities go traditional, we get weird.
Rich Table has a big pasta section, but it’s in no way an Italian restaurant. Neither is Octavia, where Melissa Perello serves a starter of chilled squid-ink noodles with bottarga (cured roe) and lemon “agrumato.” Mission Chinese Food pushes the black noodle even further, serving ink pappardelle with lamb, harissa yogurt and fennel. At Prairie, the new Mission restaurant run by Delfina veteran Anthony Strong, the chef serves rice cakes with chanterelles and pine nuts alongside more European-leaning dishes like shrimp and burrata tortelli with Calabrian chili and celery sofrito.
“Across the country, a great deal of effort is being poured into the idea of making the greatest pasta you’ll ever eat,” writes Jeff Gordinier, food and drinks editor at Esquire magazine, in an email. And yet, with the exception of one or two places, it tends to be presented in a traditional ways. “Most of the pasta-making I’ve encountered, from Via Carota (in New York) to Felix Trattoria (in Los Angeles), has a back-to-the-roots quality — like the Band instead of the Beatles.”
Perhaps the universal presence of pasta — even avant-garde pasta — on so many Bay Area menus dates back to the era when Paul Bertolli introduced a strong Italian influence to Chez Panisse, or the 1990s, when every restaurant in town felt compelled to placate vegetarians with a pasta dish, or the fact that generations of children in America have grown up eating spaghetti and red sauce.
One thing is clear: The skill with which it’s made is due to the depth of talent that cooks here are exposed to. Restaurants like Delfina, Oliveto, Flour + Water and Quince have trained generations of cooks in pastamaking. For example, Bertolli took Michael Tusk, one of his cooks, to Italy, which helped inspire Tusk’s sublime pastas at Quince and Cotogna.
Decades later, a young Quince line cook named Alexander Hong opened Sorrel, whose menu includes dishes such as tortelloni verdi with sweet corn and lovage.
But the alt-pasta? That’s more recent.
“When I first came to town, I’d say San Francisco was having its ubertraditional regional moment,” says SPQR chef Matthew Accarrino, who arrived here in 2009. “I caught so much (bleep) for not ascribing to ‘Which region of Italy are you cooking from?’ I’m like huh? I’m not doing that.”
Accarrino, whose family is from the Puglia region, has cooked in Italy as well as New York, and SPQR was originally a Roman restaurant, but he calls himself a New American cook, free to incorporate huitlacoche or habanada peppers into his pasta dishes: food that responds to the city around it as well as to the farms and ranches that supply the ingredients.
“Pasta is an amazing vehicle for absorbing flavors, much like bread,” Accarrino says. “It gives you a backdrop to experiment against.” That has meant charred onion tops and dehydrated carrots. Some of his more outre-sounding pastas, like burntflour corzetti or bludnudlen (pasta flavored with pig’s blood), are actually regional specialties from Italy, framed in new ways.
Evan Rich trained in pasta making under Michael Tusk, too, as the chef de cuisine at Quince. When he and Sarah opened Rich Table, Tusk offered them one of his old pasta-making machines. Evan shrugged and accepted it, figuring he might sell it for extra cash if it didn’t get much use, but instead they ended up setting up a pasta station in the kitchen.
But both Riches wanted to see how far they could push it. “I love eating pasta when it’s done right,” Evan says. “It’s something special, but I’m not Italian. I don’t study Italian cuisine. I don’t pretend to know the traditions. I’m a Northern Californian cook. I cook with the influences out here.”
In fact, a couple times someone has commented that one of his dishes tastes like something they ate in Italy, and he takes it off the menu the next day. “Evan doesn’t like being told what to do,” Sarah laughs.
“I also think we take the same perspective with pastas as we do with other dishes,” she continues. “We think about texture, acidity and flavor, or an ingredient we find at the market that inspires the dish.”
The pasta experimentation isn’t limited to restaurants. Two Oakland companies, Community Grains (owned by Oliveto owner Bob Klein) and Baia Pasta, produce dried pastas made with heirloom wheats. Community Grains, for example, sells a pipe rigate pasta made with hard white winter wheat grown by Fritz Durst at Capay Mills, and Baia sells orecchiette (and other shapes) made from Kenter Canyon Farms’ Miwok organic durum.
When Baia Pasta founder Renato Sardo, who was formerly the director of Slow Food in Italy, moved to the Bay Area, he says, “I realized after a while that there were many food activists that were supporting the ideas behind Slow Food but there weren’t many slow-food producers.”
Not only are the Bay Area’s even temperatures and humidity levels ideal for dried pasta production, but grains like khorosan and spelt can make great pasta — but only when working on a small scale. For Sardo, one other factor made Baia Pasta survive: retailers like Rainbow Grocery and Bi-Rite that are comfortable working with food startups.
“At the end of the day, the San Francisco eater wants delicious, soul-warming food,” says Evan Rich. That applies, he adds, to chef-driven restaurants like his, where diners expect culinary legerdemain, as well as more straightforward family places. “And what’s more soul-warming than some comfort food like pizza and pasta?”