Evan Funke’s new Venice, California, restaurant Felix is currently the most exciting place to eat pasta in the United States. So rather than labor under the tutelage of a wise Italian nonna to learn the secrets of superlative traditional filled pastas, Test Kitchen director Stacy Adimando headed west
I’d always imagined learning to make tiny, perfect tortellini from an aging native of Bologna or mastering pillowy agnolotti through a long apprenticeship in an obscure Piedmontese village. But then I heard about Evan Funke and his pasta-centric restaurant on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, with its pristine, glassed-in pasta laboratory, his arsenal of authentic tools, and his fiercely traditional, monklike dedication to the art and culture of handmade pasta. Here, I realized, was the burly, bearded, mattarello-wielding, sfoglia-rolling filled-pasta-making mentor I was looking for.
The mattarello is a massive, meter-long wooden pasta rolling pin typical of Emilia-Romagna. Funke got his in Bologna and within minutes of my arrival, he’s deployed it to transform a springy ball of spinach dough into a sfoglia, or pasta sheet, as even, smooth, and soft as the felt on a pool table.
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