FOOD SPOTLIGHT
Chef Gabriele Luna rolls out fresh pasta from the About Pasta corner
Take a pasta class at About Eatery, savour treats at Café Kitsuné, and dine at Nan Tei.
The idea behind About Eatery’s chef Gabriele Luna “About Pasta” corner is to create different kinds of pasta. “A few shapes are common in Thailand, but there are more uncommon ones,” he says. His new pasta menu, featuring 10 different shapes and sauces, has a cluster from the North, Centre and the South of Italy. The pasta corner is to make sure diners eat fresh, a la minute pasta. Choose pastas from the display counter and then watch them be rolled, flipped, bent, twisted, intertwined and stretched. Feel like giving it a twirl yourself? Chef Luna welcomes it!
Hailing from the town Potenza in southern Italy, chef Luna can make some 30 shapes of pasta and through the years has perfected the more complicated pasta shapes at finger-breaking speed. Talk about “pasta Potenza” (which means “the power of pasta”)!
The 10 traditional pastas on offer are made from pasta flour and also semolina. The casarecce (B390), which means home-made, originates from Sicily and are short twists, much like a cheese straw. The scialatielli (B590) originates from the Amalfi Coast and is normally cut slightly unevenly, to a similar shape to tagliatelle but shorter, thicker and wider. Umbria’s wheat pasta called strangozzi gets its name from its shape, which resembles a shoe lace. It is served with cream sauce (B590). In Genoa, Liguria, pesto is most commonly tossed with trofie (B390), a short, twisted pasta.
“I choose to make really traditional pasta dishes because I want people to learn about pasta and its origins, from scratch,” says chef Luna. “Everything must be original,” he adds. About Eatery has a separate specials menu, which changes frequently, and offers the chef’s original pasta dishes. “With new ingredients, I get new idea for new dishes,” he exclaims.
If you make a choice, try the Giro D’Italia Set for two (B980), which is named after Italy’s version of the Tour de France. Diners can take their own culinary tour around Italy, with four pastas to pair with four sauces. There’s also the “Fasta Pasta Challenge” where Chef Luna selects a few diners to a pasta-making competition. And if you want to try making the dishes in the comfort of your own kitchen, opt for About Eatery’s “Takeaway Fresh Pasta Kits”.