Now I Want A Pasta Making Machine

Pazzo Pasteria

13777 Nacogdoches Road, #107

(near O'Connor Road)

  When I was a kid growing up, I don't think my Italian grandmother ever made her own pasta. There was a shop in Hammond, Louisiana -- the local metropolis five miles away -- that sold fresh, so why bother? Besides, she never worried too much about the shape of the pasta, and I've pretty much adopted the same who-cares mentality about it. I buy and use a few basic shapes: capellini, if I want long pasta (though I'll occasionally use fettucine or linguine, and rarely spaghetti); conchiglie, if I want short pasta, or occasionally orecchiete, cavatapi, penne, ziti or rigatoni if they're readily available. Lots of times they aren't. And when you're using store-bought dry pasta, it doesn't really make a lot of difference.

 But after one dinner at Pazzo Pasteria I feel a little differently about the whole subject. There's no store-bought pasta in the place, and I think I could actually tell the difference. Who'd 'a ever have thunk it?

 We had been at the movies, an uncommon event for us, seeing the new Christmas movie Red One at the Quarry; and since we had already covered a third of the distance involved, I figured we might as well go the rest of the way. 

 It's not a big place, just two units in an ordinary strip center, and the well-lit dining room is barely half the total. The ambience is American suburban with a hint of nostalgic Italian, mostly provided by the unobtrusive soundtrack of quiet modern music interspersed with things that would have made my mother exclaim, "Oh, I love this song!" (A single song from Perry Como would keep her happy for hours.) It was all quite comfortable. We were greeted with a big smile and I had the feeling that, if the hostess had known our names, she would have introduced us around to the other diners. 

What the ratings mean

 Having come so far, we decided to splurge a little bit, so we started with wine and an appetizer of spiedini. (I had been thinking vaguely of making some myself, and wanted to see how it was done here.) The name, spiedini, means "on a skewer" or something like that; when I was a kid, it was what we called kebab. Pazzo's version is from some other part of Italy. It was mozzarella cheese wrapped in prosciutto, which is a good combination, but it was served on a fabulously delicious bed of spinach dressed with a balsamic vinaigrette and coarsely grated parmesan that lifted it way beyond merely good. 

 We each freshened our palates with a small house salad and bread. The salad was a mix of lettuce and spinach with a few interesting ingredients added, most notably some really piquant finely-sliced onion that gave a wonderful and unexpected kick to the course. All this was topped with an excellent vinaigrette dressing, not the balsamic version that had been so nicely applied to the previous course, but a milder sort that complemented the character of the salad's ingredients. The bread was good but not that good, especially compared to everything else. One breadbasket is complementary at Pazzo; after that they're something like three bucks. I'm sure they do that because of people like me, who will happily make an entire meal of the bread, given the opportunity and a certain superior quality. In this case I was happy with just the complementary quantity.

 All the pasta dishes offered come in two sizes. Since we'd started with appetizer and salad, the smaller size seemed sufficient, and they were; but when I go back, if I don't have an appetizer, I will want the larger size. I guarantee it. My wife's choice was fusilli gorgonzola: pasta spirals in a creamy cheese sauce, with chicken. I'm the opposite of a big fan of gorgonzola cheese, which is the Italian version of bleu cheese. I think of it as rotten, so I never eat it. But I did sample her pasta course, and found it tasty. I still would never order it myself. In the words of somebody more famous than me, My gorge rises at it.

 I went with bucatini fiorentia: tubes of pasta in a butter and garlic sauce, with spinach, mushrooms and chicken. Oh. My. God. Oh, my God! The combination of flavours was outstanding, and the textures! This is why freshly-made pasta is better than store-bought. I had never had bucatini before; I thought the word had something to do with oil wells (it means something like "little bore-holes" and turns out to be an apt description of the shape). But now that I've had bucatini at Pazzo, I want a pasta making machine so I can have it whenever I want at home. (I won't get one, of course, but at least now I can see the point of one.)

 All in all, an outstanding meal. I wish I'd picked a better wine to go with it.