I Spent Two Months Trying To Find Shanghai's Best Pasta, Part 1
Photos by Brandon McGhee
It started with a lasagna.
I was at an Italian family restaurant that’s been around for ages. It’s deep in a lane, packed seven nights a week, a neighborhood staple. I ordered a drink and a lasagna. The lasagna, an average mushy square of sauce and cheese, made it to the table before the drink, and the drink didn’t take long.
It was hot as lava and crusty as a wet towel. Telltale signs of the microwave.
My date had an arrabbiata, so bland it couldn’t be saved by any of the types of chili on offer. I hoped to salvage dinner with a focaccia. The “focaccia” turned out to be pizza dough dusted with dried herbs. I shouldn’t say— fuck it, it was Bella Napoli — but this type of mediocre cooking passed off as home-style Italian is disappointingly prevalent in Shanghai.
So I set off on a mission to find better pasta, to leave the Bella Napolis of the world behind, a quest, you might call it, for carbs.
A Pasta Quest.
The rules of the Quest were simple. First, I’d try a range of Bella Napoli’s competitors. If they couldn’t do better, I’d keep going up in price.
In total, I visited 15 Italian restaurants in the last couple of weeks, going incognito and paying my way through all of them, even when dinners reached four figures per person. The Quest wouldn’t be comprehensive — it’s not another dumpling guide — but it would be exhaustive. As in, I’d be exhausted of pasta.
And it worked. I found some excellent pastas. But first I found a whole lot of disappointment.
Chapter 1: The King of What?
Da Marco is the king. Of what, exactly, is the question. I’ve been a dozen times over the years, but went back in March on a mission. Among the 25 pastas on the menu, could I find one to recommend?
I asked a Chinese chef, a talented guy who has worked in both Da Marco and several high-end Italian restaurants, what to order. He said this.
He was wrong about one thing. The orecchiette weren’t great either.
The cacio e pepe, an extremely simple dish but one that shows clearly how much skill the kitchen has, was an abject failure. The kitchen didn’t even bother trying to make a sauce out of the cheese, black pepper and cooking water; instead it was buttered pasta with a pile of cheese on top. The white lamb ragu on thick paccheri looked like finely diced cat vomit.
It got worse from there. I wouldn’t call it inauthentic though: Italy, a lovely country, has awful restaurants as well.
My meal left me with two questions about Da Marco, which has been going strong for close to two decades now. One: why is it full of Italians when the food is so aggressively average? Two: who painted the two-meter tall oil painting of King Marco hanging by the staircase?
Chapter 2: A Trail of Disappointment
I tried Palatino, a “Roman” restaurant with not a single Roman pasta on the menu.
I went to Porto Matto, where chef Roberto Bernasconi from Puglia served me a soupy bowl of tomato sauce masquerading as pasta a la chitarra, cut with the “guitar” strings (Scialatelli alla calabrese, 120rmb).
At Meanwhile in Xintiandi, the chefs likewise confused the concept of soup and sauce, serving me a carbonara flooded with a bright yellow egg emulsion, like eating a raw frittata (Roman Carbonara al Guanciale, 98rmb). I hoped for more from a three-meat tomato ragu (Tagliatelle Tre Carni, 148rmb), especially with the big-name chef the Pizza Express people have imported for this project. What I got was another tomato sauce with grey cubes of poached meat that tasted their color.
The marquee name chef stood in front of the pass, gossiping and back-slapping the customers, and the marquee name bartender sat at the bar at 8.30pm on a Saturday night eating staff dinner. Meanwhile in Xintiandi, another disappointing meal was had.
Chapter 3: Kitchens Aren't Fueled by Charm
The homey entrance to Casa Mia
I really wanted to like Casa Mia. The ramshackle and must-be-illegal little restaurant, hidden around the back of the Donghu Hotel (go until you are sure it’s not there, and then go a little further), has undeniable charm and charisma.
Run by a husband-and-wife team who used to work at Dolce Vita, above Funkadeli, it’s a jumbled cave of a restaurant. Some of the seats are Ikea folding chairs, there is no menu (so you never know prices either, argh), and there’s not even a door between the kitchen, the bathroom sink and the dining room. There’s not a second restaurant in Shanghai like it.
Too bad their homemade tagliatelle was overcooked and their ravioli absent of flavor. The lesson there was that kitchens aren’t fueled by charm.
Chapter 4: They Didn't Have Music and I Don't Have Pictures
I was agnostic going into Bistro Sola, which I thought was an Italian restaurant run by a Japanese chef down near Zhaojiabang Lu. I left fuming, exasperated and cussing after a four-hour ordeal for four (tiny) courses.
Everything about the restaurant, spread over three floors, was a disaster except for the food, which was quite competent, but turned out to be Italian but also French but also Japanese but also whatever they felt like.
It’s easier to talk about what was missing, like any type of service — a table opposite ours asked the sole waiter if he was actually withholding silverware from him after three courses of forgetting — and music.
The dead silent room collectively seethed as we were held hostage by the four-course tasting menu (bless the table who opted for seven courses and are probably still there) until finally one diner had the sense to open up an app on his phone and start playing his own jazz playlist for the room.
The consensus seems to be that the chef was already stretched thin before he won a Black Pearl award, and now that he has achieved one and his business has rocketed, everything else has fallen apart. Since I went, he has discontinued the tasting menus. Probably for the best. Nice ox-tail tortellini though.
Chapter 5: The Quest Turns Around!
The Black Pearl has changed the fortunes of another restaurant’s pasta, but this time for the better. Scarpetta, an Italian trattoria south of Zhaojiabang Lu, also won the award in 2018.
The orecchiette with tomato sauce and bone marrow
The effect has been a doubling of their business, and a doubling-down by their chef, Patrick Leano, on the pasta station. Since the win, the kitchen has gotten so busy, Leano told me, that he’s been thrust onto the pasta station himself, one of the harder positions in the kitchen, and so, counter-intuitively, the award has probably improved the quality of the restaurant’s noodles. (No disrespect to the previous pasta chefs, but Leano has a serious fine-dining background and is an accomplished kitchen hand.)
Things started to turn around for me on this Quest around the time of my most recent meal at Scarpetta, which included three pastas: an orecchiette with tomato sauce and bone marrow (188rmb); a lobster linguine (228rmb); and a fennel sausage paccheri (138rmb). All were excellent.
Fennel sausage paccheri
There is one criticism of Scarpetta however, and it’s unlike any other on this list: too much flavor.
In the past year, the owner and chef together have revamped the menu to make every dish really ‘pop’, but to my taste, they have made some of them too intense. What is exciting on the first bite becomes intense on the second and overwhelming by the fourth. It’s as if, in their ramping up the intensity on all the dishes, they forgot that people are not just tasting one or two bites, but eating the entire thing, and an ultra-condensed flavor bomb is hard to get through.
It’s the difference between a fresh tomato and sun-dried tomato. Still, the argument is basically that it’s too much of a good thing, and Scarpetta is a good thing.
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It gets better from here! Join us tomorrow for PastaQuest Part 2, in which St. Cavish discovers where all the best pasta in Shanghai has been hiding.
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