Guide to chosing Pasta at an Italian restaurant

Talk about Italian food and the first thing anyone will think of will be pasta. And when you eat out at an Italian restaurant you’re very likely to choose pasta as one of your courses. Though risotto or soup also make a delicious choice for your primo (first course) it is pasta that has captured the imagination of the world. It is so versatile, comes in an infinite variety of shapes and has almost as many different sauces to go with it, so you could probably eat a different pasta dish every day of the year if you wanted to!

Matching a pasta sauce to a shape that suits it is almost as much an art as cooking the sauce. Certain shapes are especially designed to capture thin sauces in textured surfaces and hollows, while long ribbon pasta shapes like tagliatelle are perfect for wrapping around chunkier sauces, like thick meat ragu made with rich wild boar or venison.

Pasta can be divided into two main types: fresh pasta, made usually with egg and  slightly dried before cooking, which includes tagliatelle and fettucine as well as stuffed pastas like ravioli; and dried factory-made pasta in a host of different shapes and sizes.

In Italy, fresh pasta is the first choice for feast days and celebrations. Making your own fresh pasta, especially filled pasta like tortellini, is a labour of love and the excellence of the fresh pasta is the badge of a good family restaurant. Often behind the scenes is a dedicated group of grandmothers, aunts and in laws sitting around a huge table deftly hand-shaping intricate parcels of pasta, filled with ricotta and spinach or a savoury meat mixture, for a wedding or big event. In Britain your fresh pasta is more likely to have been skillfully prepared by the chefs and it is a delicious choice for a first course – you can try ravioli filled with wild mushrooms or with salmon or go for the traditional spinach and ricotta filling with a delicate sauce.

Though considered more the everyday pasta, dry pasta still has an honorable place on the restaurant menu. There are many fine sauces that only work well with dry pasta and would be totally lost in combination with fresh pasta. For example spaghetti aglio olio with a simple but tasty garlic and oil sauce and spaghetti alla carbonara with its creamy egg sauce suit the spaghetti shape and texture perfectly.

Freshly grated parmesan cheese adds mellow flavour to a lot of pasta sauces but doesn’t go well with all of them, so you may want to taste your pasta before automatically sprinkling cheese liberally over your plate. As a rule parmesan complements most meat sauces and many cream and tomato based sauces, but its flavour can overwhelm very delicate sauces and it generally isn’t used on seafood pasta dishes like spaghetti alle vongole (with clams) and some very fresh light sauces are also better without.

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