Soupy Pasta

This isn't a dish I learned. It's one I remembered — and rebuilt.

I first had this pasta when I was in middle school, at an old Italian restaurant tucked between Koreatown and Hollywood in Los Angeles. The leather booths were worn. The kitchen smelled like garlic and wine. The pasta wasn't plated neatly — it came in a bowl, soaking in broth, rich with the taste of the sea and something smoky I couldn't name at the time.

That place is long gone. The flavor faded, too — until I realized no one else was serving it. For years, I searched for that same bowl of comfort. Every time I thought I found it, I was disappointed. So I decided to stop searching — and start recreating.

I started with manila clams, littleneck clams, white wine and bacon — the pieces I now recognize as the base of that memory. Then came the broth — made not to coat the pasta, but to surround it.

The pasta itself is pici, extruded by hand using a 100-year-old Italian press. It's rustic, chewy, and unapologetically soulful.

It's not about looking back. It's about bringing something back — a taste, a memory, a feeling — and offering it, humbly, one bowl at a time.

— Chef Andrew Joo