Anyone who’s tried to get in touch with me this year knows that it’s been a precarious task. What city am I in? What country am I in? Where am I going next? There have been a few times that I’ve woken up and had to ask myself these questions.
Being nomadic has its advantages. I see surroundings with fresh eyes, taking in nuances that I otherwise would have overlooked. Especially in San Francisco, where I lived briefly years ago but never quite felt like a local. While working on the SPQR cookbook, I’ve taken touristy detours: I watched a sunset from Fort Mason, walked from the Embarcadero to Fillmore Street on steep California Ave., hiked up Telegraph Hill, put down an exceedingly pricy cup of coffee at the Ferry Building.
epic tasting of Piemonte wines (yes, those are bottles of Rinaldi and La Spinetta, among others)
I’ve also spent a lot of time at SPQR with my co-authors. There was an incredible 115-bottle Barolo and Barbaresco tasting with Shelley Lindgren. There have also been a lot of pasta tutorials with Matthew Accarrino.
The guy is very good at making things difficult–for the right reasons. He and his crew make fresh pasta daily. Even while discussing recipes, Matthew would bring out a sheet of dough and start shaping Friuli-style dumplings or rolling cavatelli by hand. Unlike a lot of restaurants, SPQR does not freeze fresh pasta. After a filled pasta is made, it is merely refrigerated on a thick bed of semolina flour. Extruded pasta, like spaghetti, is left out on baking sheets. The pasta is never kept for more than a day, and if you’ve seen the size of the walk-in, you’d know why.
If you could also peer into the tiny attic prep kitchen during dinner service, you’d see two cooks in there assembling filled pasta. During service. No one does that. But these pastas are amazing: firm to the tooth when they should be, like with bucatini, and soft and yielding otherwise, as with agnolotti. With the amount of craftsmanship put into each plate, eating pasta at SPQR might be one of the best restaurant deals going in San Francisco. (Especially considering what I spent on a cup of coffee at the Ferry Building.)
Below are a few shapshots of pasta making and eating at SPQR this year. (For more on making pasta, see this post on dough and this post on ramp spaghetti.)
Tiny tortellini
Hand-rolled cavatelli
Hand-rolled strozzapreti
Pasta dough resting and hydrating before being rolled out.
Smoked linguini with uni and orange wine
The remains of ragu
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