My Life in Meals: The Pasta Queen
"Before school, I would go every morning to pick up my pizza at Roscioli because that's what you have for breakfast when you go to school – pizza."
Nadia Caterina Munno, aka The Pasta Queen, is a cook, recipe developer, and social media star. For her highly entertaining cooking tutorials, follow her on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. She also has her own line of authentic sauces.
I live in Tampa now. I found a 1920s chateau in 2016. It was abandoned, half burnt down. I renovated it for a year to its original glory.
How’s my kitchen? How do you think? It’s very Italian, just like me. It’s got terracotta tiles, it's got marble floorings, it's got the copper, it's got the brass. And it's been designed by Florentine artisans. They flew from Florence to install it. They didn't want anybody to touch it. They built it to spec. It's custom-made. It took eight months to develop, and then they flew over to install it.
My espresso machine is La Marzocco. It’s a commercial slash custom residential espresso machine with a pressure adjustable portafilter. I have two grinding machines. I import the coffee weekly. I actually get it from Seattle, but their mixture is Italian. “Italian,” quote, unquote. By the way, let’s debunk a myth. We don't grow coffee beans in Italy. It's all Arabic mixtures. You know, like from Yemen, from Mocha. You know, Mocha is actually the name of a port in Yemen?
I grew up in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, a little village in the region of Campania, about 20 to 30 km from the Amalfi Coast. It's rolling, rolling. But there's also mountains. I will say hills and mountains. And, you know, we have Mount Vesuvius, for example. You couldn't say that's a hill. The land is rich, fertile because of the volcanic ashes. It's got the highest concentration of minerals because of the volcanic ashes. So the wine, the tomatoes, the buffalo mozzarella, the cheeses, it's all very, very high nutrition, high flavor content.
My great-great-great-grandparents started producing their own pasta. First it was for the family. Then they sold the flour to the local mills, and then they had so much pasta, dry pasta, they were drying it in the actual street. It was called Macaroni street. And to this day, they call us the macaroni, because we made dried pasta.
I made wine with my grandparents. Strawberry grapes. It's a specific breed that the ancient Romans brought down south. Un vino fragolino sigma. And it's a strawberry grape wine. Very sweet. Not a dessert wine. You just drink it. It's got a lot of alcohol.
My brother and I made it by pressing down the grapes with our feet in the wine barrels. So satisfying, the feeling, your bare feet. We're like, you know, like drowning, almost. And you just keep on going, keep on going down. My grandfather loved to throw us in there. He drove us around in his Lamborghini tractor.
I was cooking with my grandmother. In the kitchen, cooking from scratch. My first ever dish was gnocchi. It was one of our favorites. Potato gnocchi. My nona had a special room where they kept all the sacks of flour that they brought in from their own wheat. The room smelled old. It was from the seventeen hundreds. It had high ceilings and was kind of damp. There were all these sacks of flour and hanging prosciutto. And then she had this corner made out of stone and a slab of wood where we'd just make fresh pasta. Like drag huge amounts of flour and just make a ton of gnocchi. And I was so small that I had a little stool. I would smell the flour and the gnocchi and the potato – all of it so fresh. I've never tasted something like that to this day, no matter what, Michelin star, no matter what.
Neapolitan ragù is a bit different than the ground beef you have here. It is like slow-cooking. Beef cuts, pork ribs, sausage. And then you would cook it. You would sear it a little bit and then smoke it with a red wine and then add a ton of tomato, which my nona made with their own tomatoes, and then let it cook for at least 12 hours. Oh my God. And the meat, after 12 hours, it was like a melt in your mouth. So tender. And then she would break the long ziti by hand.
In Italy, you always meet for meals with your family. It's frowned upon if you don't. It's cultural. Like, there's no choice on the weekend. You're not gonna take off with your spouse or your romantic partner or your kids. No, no, no. It's disrespectful. It's a moment to catch up with your grandparents, with your great-grandparents, if you're lucky. The kids are running around. Everybody catches up, on their wins and losses, on their life struggle.
My family’s culture wasn't the restaurant culture. It was like, no, there's no way. Like, that's too fancy. Fancy people do that. It's not that you don't do it. You do it once a month. We would do agriturismo. You go from your home to another home, and another nona is cooking for you with their own tradition, their own favorite ingredients.
I started going to restaurants in Rome. I lived there as a teenager. I went to school and worked in my other nona’s apothecary. I liked the Roman restaurants. But we don't call them restaurants. We don't go to the restaurant. We go more to the osterias, the trattorias. osterias are very raw, rustic; it’s like home cooking on the streets. A trattoria features local, only local, authentic ingredients. At a restaurant, they'll have a pesto, but it's not Roman. They'll have specific seafoods, but they’re not Roman. At a restaurant, you can sample a wide variety of regional cooking, but it's not exclusively from the local agriculture.
Campo de’ Fiori, it's very touristy nowadays. But there's also, like, such incredible local culture that is hidden in the alleyways that the tourists don't know. You'll turn a corner, it doesn't even look like a trattoria or an osteria. And then it's like the best food you've ever had. It's really the holes in the wall type of thing that, to me, gather the best gems. They have the farmers that come in the morning, they pick their ingredients. ‘I want this piece of cheese, that meat, that chicken, that lamb.’ You know what I mean? ‘That pork.’
There's a whole food culture in Rome that is huge, which is the Ghetto. The Ghetto of Rome is where there is Jewish Roman cuisine. People don't know about it. They have some of the most incredible dishes. I love all their greens. Like, there's the way they fry the artichokes, but also the earthiness of the fried stuff, the pork and the lard. Because I went to school right on the border, I got to frequent the Ghetto of Rome quite a lot. That's how it's called. That area is called the Ghetto. I know it's got a bad connotation here in America, but in Rome, it's just the Ghetto. And it's Jewish Roman food culture and it's incredible.
Before school, I would go every morning to pick up my pizza at Roscioli because that's what you have for breakfast when you go to school – pizza. Yes, of course. But it's not the pizza that you have in the pizzeria. Bah! It's the pizza bianca, pizza rosa. You know what I mean?
I dropped the acting for a bit — did I tell you I was an actress? I was discovered by an agent in a park in Rome. I was in an Italian feature, a comedy. I did commercials for L'Oréal. There’s a little bit of a deeper, interesting story, which we won't talk about. But it was rough. There was a lot of drugs, and I got a little scared. I was very young. I saw things, and I was like, ‘you know, I'll take a little break from this.’ I moved to London. I didn’t speak a word of English. After a year and a half, I started speaking a little bit more. People thought I was arrogant, because I didn't have the British manners. I'd go inside a café or a restaurant and I was the loudest person there.
I cooked for my husband for the first time at his place in South London. I think that's how I got him. In Rome, people are very aggressive. They're like, ‘oh, you're hot.’ ‘Oh, let's go out.’ They're whistling at you. They're hitting on you hard. But my husband seemed completely disinterested. I thought he didn't like me because of his ways, but he really liked me, he just couldn't say it. So I made him Linguine Lo Scoglio. And for the first time, I saw a tiny bit of emotion showing through. He was like, ‘this is so good.’ He had not tasted something so flavorful.
Oh my God, I think I'm addicted to a classic British Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding. When I was pregnant—I got pregnant in London—I quickly went back to Rome, because I was like, ‘my child is gonna be born in Rome.’ But I missed the Sunday roast, the mashed potatoes, the roast beef. Still, I will never make it. You cannot do that. You have to be British for at least ten generations before attempting. I will never do that to the British people.
Italy, it's not like, ‘oh, wow, what a cosmopolitan food culture.’ But London is very international. Lebanese, Thai, Indian. Some of the best restaurants in London are Indian. I became obsessed in my early twenties with Indian food. I love Indian food. I love the spices. I love curry. You find the best in South London.
The food in Tampa? It’s…let's say I cook from home a lot. But I do like Rocca, they won a Michelin star. The owner is a young entrepreneur, studied in Italy for ten years. Great fresh pasta maker. The restaurant is incredible. And they just reconfirmed their Michelin star recently. They are very, very good.
I have four kids. They all cook. We like to make spicy vodka. I think it’s because we’re living in America, it makes them feel like they're both Italian and American. Because it's a very Italian American dish. It is more popular here, even though it's an Italian disco dish. It was born in a disco in the 1980s. In Italy, yes. It's the disco pasta. But it is more popular in America than it is in Italy.