The secret stagiaire: Officina 00
There I was, stationed on the dedicated pasta-making workbench next to the window in Officina 00. The Girl from Ipanema had just started playing over the speaker system. It sounded like the Sinatra version, but I couldn’t be sure because of the noise and fuss of the remarkably busy Monday night service.
It was raining outside and I had been left to roll fresh pappardelle dough through the hand-worked pasta machine by a CDP named Tibs. He’d managed to make it over to the open main kitchen to melt a saucepan of lard on the stove and to see if any top-ups of pasta were required. I watched him go as I rolled and saw the head chef, Elia Sebregondi, with his arms aloft, shouting theatrical Italian to his two other chefs there, clearly enjoying himself.
My dough needed to be rolled through seven separate times, each time on a smaller setting and, despite having to throw great swathes of semolina on it as I went to stop it sticking, I wasn’t yet covered in flour. With the dough becoming ever longer, more supple and harder to control, a curious couple, without an umbrella, started filming me through the window from outside. I wondered if I looked the part, now practically wearing the pappardelle and unable to stop smiling.
The pappardelle egg pasta dough is one of seven base doughs made at Officina (which means workshop in Italian) and they all contain professional-grade, 00 quality wheat flour from Elia’s native Naples. There were eight different pasta dishes on the menu that night but it changes regularly, with Elia able to buy the highest quality meat, fish and fillings for the pasta because it’s pretty cheap to get good flour in comparison.
With the dough rolled and my arm in bits, Tibs and I portioned the pappardelle, which would rest for a time before being put in the eight-degree, low-ventilation fridge and, eventually, cooked and served with a Neapolitan ragu and meatballs, with a runny blob of Italian burrata on top. Already in the fridge were trays of pumpkin gnocchi (to be cooked with brown butter and sage and topped with gorgonzola), winding squid ink tagliolini (a new addition from Elia that, he insists, goes best with fish) and crab-stuffed cappellacci with saffron and salsify.
Tibs, who used to be a lawyer and had got the job at Officina after meeting Elia during a five-a-side football match, showed me the raviolo too. These were to be fried and served singly as a bar snack. “When you make the pasta, I don’t want super straight lines and everything identical,” Elia says. “Imperfections are not bad things with hand-made pasta. The texture can actually be better for the mouth.”
After the pappardelle, Tibs and I tackled pici (hand-rolled, fat spaghetti) and then spaghetti. For the latter, I got to use a chitarra, which is known as a pasta guitar. With this, you lay a sheath of pasta dough over its metal strings and roll, over and over. Then, you pluck the ‘guitar’ to make the spaghetti fall through and out.
After portioning both, I caught the eye of Elia in the kitchen, who beckoned for me to the pass for plating. People were ordering pasta dishes in pairs so, for each, he would do one and I would try to do the other. “We do natural plating,” he says as he tosses a pan of corzetti (discs of pasta made from a dough mixed with white wine) with wild mushrooms and sausage before gently sliding it onto a plate, spooning leftover sauce over the top. “It can’t be fussy. It’s not the way.”
Elia’s pass is small, but he likes the fact that he can reach everything, including the truffle toothbrush just above the overworked tab grabber and the four-litre full of aged provolone and a tired looking grater on top. I did my best Elia impression with my corzetti plating attempt, terrified that I wasn’t quite rustic enough with it. “Everyone has their own way,” he says, kindly okaying my attempt by balancing a piece of fresh basil on top and clapping me on the back. “They’re your hands! The final product is important. I don’t mind how you get there.”
Then it was onto the squid ink tagliolini with anchovies, chilli and clams from a Cornish day boat with a generous sprinkle of breadcrumbs, then straight into the pici and then spaghetti. For all three, Elia got me to use a pair of long tweezers rather than the cumbersome spoon, swirling the strands of pasta around it before plating. At the stove, a CDP called Andrea used a pair while cooking, drawing endless circles in each of his many pans of pasta to keep things moving. It would stick, Elia told me, if he left one for even 20 seconds.
For my efforts that evening, I was allowed to cook and plate a portion of occhi, Officina 00’s signature. Andrea first takes me out back to show me a deep gastro full of purple-coloured meat in the fridge that was the filling for their occhi. He’s been in the country for eight months and his English is good, but he’d never explained a recipe to a stagiaire before. We look at each other, both a bit confused.
After some deliberation, I learn that pork is braised with lots of onions in red wine for eight hours before being sieved, the resulting juice becoming the sauce for the dish. The occhi is rolled and stuffed with the purple meat and the juice goes into a squeezy bottle.
Back in the thick of it, we put seven occhi into rolling water and then butter and a squeeze of the bottle into a pan on a low heat. Six minutes later, I turned the heat up full (prompted by many gesticulations from Andrea), and in went the occhi. A quick fry, plenty of tossing of the pan, a dab of cavolo nero and plenty of the provolone on top and it was ready to go. Not only did I get to cook and plate it, but I got to eat it too. Never has imperfect tasted so good.
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