Fresh pasta is great; dried is a compromise. That’s the common belief outside of Italy. It’s false. New hautdegamme series.
My nonna was from Trieste. I lived less than an hour’s drive away from Italy for decades, travelled it end to end, north to south, east to west. I love Italy, so I have visited sixteen of Italy’s twenty regions and eaten in all sixteen. Even many Italians have not done that. Before I moved to Britain, I worked on food-related projects across Italy. I am still in touch with Italian chefs, producers, and journalists. So I have watched the British view on pasta from a particular angle, and what I see always makes me wonder.
Look at most restaurant reviews here in the U.K., from journalists or eaters on social media, and you will find the same sentence, in one form or another: “they make their own pasta in-house,” offered as proof of excellence. Fresh is good, the logic runs, and dried is what you settle for when you cannot be bothered.
No one says this in Italy. Or if they do, they say it differently, about a specific dish, matched to what the dish needs. In Italy, fresh pasta belongs to certain regions, mostly central-north, Emilia above all. In the south it is mostly dry pasta, and that is not a lesser tradition; it is a different and equally serious one. In Britain, this distinction simply does not exist. All pasta gets flattened into one conversation, one hierarchy, one error.
Massimo Bottura put it to me plainly: fresh and dried are two distinct expressions, not rivals, each with its own place and purpose. Massimo celebrates and serves both in his restaurants, even though his own region, Emilia, is known for its fresh egg pasta. The fact that he chooses not to take a side, even in defence of his own traditions, suggests that this debate adds little to what really matters.
Fresh pasta and dried pasta are not two ends of a quality scale. They are two different crafts, made from different flours, cooked in different times, suited to different dishes. One is not the junior version of the other.
Once you stop asking which is better, a more interesting question appears. What actually makes a pasta good? I decided to ask the people who actually know, the people who make and cook the stuff. What I found, over months of conversations, is that the myth is built on something much shakier than a simple preference.
So this will not be one article. It is a series, because no single piece could hold what I found without flattening it.
I talked to the people whom I knew would answer honestly. Riccardo Felicetti, whose family has made pasta since 1908, gave me four long, unguarded replies that took apart nearly every assumption I walked in with, including some of my own. Massimo Mancini, who grows his own durum wheat and mills it himself in Le Marche, one of the very few pastai in Italy who can say that, showed me what it actually takes to control a pasta from field to pack. Gennaro Esposito, cooking in a region where dried pasta has never been a compromise, gave me the most rigorous account I have ever heard of how a chef judges a plate of dried pasta before a single bite.
Each of these conversations deserves its own space; each is a piece in this series. We’ll also explore fresh pasta through Tortellante, a community pasta-making project in Modena, and Jess Rosval, a Canadian chef working in Italy, who will show what happens when someone from outside serves both fresh and dried pasta with equal seriousness.
What holds the series together is not pasta, but a pattern. Every myth I found – fresh over dried, artisan over industrial, Italian grain over imported – made the same mistake. It mistook a signal for the substance. It let a story stand in for a fact. My job, in each piece that follows, is to put the signal aside and look at what is actually there.
I am not asking you to stop loving fresh pasta. I love it too. I am asking you to stop assuming it is a sign of a good kitchen. The truth, as always, is more specific and more interesting than the story.
This is the first piece in a series on the myths of Italian pasta. The next instalments, with Riccardo Felicetti, Massimo Mancini, Gennaro Esposito, Tortellante, and Jess Rosval, will follow.
Andreja Lajh is the founder of Haut de Gamme, a London-based agency working with chefs, restaurants and food producers worldwide. She writes about food, wine and the restaurant world at hautdegamme.net.