Passionate about pasta

MANNY NICHAS: LEFT CORPORATE WORLD TO START OWN BUSINESS

Food is sensorial, it must give pleasure and nourish at the same time.

Meal kits available online and a chef’s table in Centurion kitchen.

He is passionate about food and is living a dream he has had for a decade. A fortnight ago, restaurateur and franchising legend Manny Nichas debuted his own brand, Pasta Barra.

It is an online, meal kit business that specialises in all things pasta using recipes developed over a decade.

Manny’s mantra is simplicity in prep and depth of taste.

Pasta Barra comprises an online store and a chef ’s table.

Pasta Barra’s home cooking kits comprise high-quality pastas with a variety of sauces and accompaniments.

From traditional bolognaise through to ratatouille and seafood fettucine, he has got it all.

The Pappardelle ragu, slowcooked shredded beef with Italian sausage salsiccia, is cooked for almost nine hours.

“None of us have the luxury of time, so Pasta Barra provides slow-food that cuts prep time at home to no more than 20 minutes,” says Manny.

And it is simple and easy.

“While researching, I ordered a lot of home meal kits and found that it can become quite painful to meticulously follow recipes, with one slice of this and a crumb or two of that. I may as well have shopped for the ingredients myself.”

Therefore, he says, he takes extra time to cook and prepare meals so that customers can literally have a full meal done and dusted in the time it takes to set the table and pour a glass of vino.

“I just love the food business, and while I have always been on the management side of food, I could never stay away from the kitchen,” he admits.

“It has been an enormous amount of work,” adds Manny, who left the corporate foodie world last year after growing the Mozambik group significantly and, prior to that, putting Ocean Basket on the map as the first billion rand market capitalised South African restaurant group.

“It’s a dream come true. It’s taken me 10 years to get to this point, to finally have my own brand with product that I spent years developing and perfecting.”

He says a month-long Pasta Barra beta-test phase had gone well, and high volumes of orders kept him very busy, and “in great appreciation of the support”.

“Everything must be an experience,” says Manny. “From ordering through to unboxing, preparing and eating.

“Food is that important. We eat with all our senses. The sizzle that we hear, the aroma that lingers in the kitchen, the steam off a hot and beautifully plated meal. The textures we feel when we bite into a forkful.

“Food is sensorial, it must give pleasure and nourish at the same time.”

He sources most ingredients locally, paired with imported Italian essentials.

The Pasta Barra chef’s table seats a maximum of 10 guests in a kitchen nook, in Manny’s Centurion based industrial kitchen.

He says it is designed to create a dining experience that you cannot get anywhere else.

“It’s mama’s kitchen, only bigger,” he laughs, adding that the inner-circle experience is designed to make guests feel part of the preparation, fuel good conversation and allow for bespoke experiences to be created.

“Cooking pasta is so much more than dunking a handful of it into boiling water,” he says. “The secret to creating really great pasta is to salt-up the water so that it contains a similar ratio to that of the Mediterranean Sea at a salinity of about 38%.

“Then,” he says, “once you have drained the pasta, use some of the discarded pasta-water in your sauce. It transforms any dish from good to great.”

Manny Nichas Owner of

Pasta Barra