Mad About Pasta

You know I love my pastas, and admittedly, I can be hypercritical of pasta in restaurants.

After over two decades in South America I’ve… gotten used to… or maybe better said, come to accept, that pasta throughout the continent is almost universally overcooked and over-sauced. It used to drive me crazy, and I would write about it that way, though over time I think I’ve toned that down and am more tolerant of “it’s just the way it is here”. And, here and there, we’ve uncovered some gems of places that understand more about pasta and insist on serving it the way it was meant to be. Or, in theory. One could, I imagine, argue for overcooked and over-sauced being the way it was meant to be, at least across the southern cone.

Now, we encountered one of the chefs behind this place a couple of months back, at what is, for me, currently one of the best restaurants in the city, Garabato Bistro. Lucas Canga, prior to that place, is one of the chef-partners behing Mad Pasta House, Av. del Libertador 13797, in the northern suburb of Martínez. That boded well, and we went with the assumption that in this case, mad = crazy, and based on their Instagram, their plates looked really creative.

It’s a beautiful space, service is stellar, everything looks amazing, dishes are presented beautifully, so why did we leave… mad, where mad in this case equaled “really disappointed”?

A creative take on mac n’cheese, rolled into balls, covered in breadcrumbs, and deep-fried. What’s not to like? Well, perhaps the intense tomato pesto that is spooned over the top that’s so powerful we couldn’t taste anything else in either that dish or the other appetizer we got at the same time.

The whole idea behind a lasagna “pincho”, a sort of stack of lasagna on a skewer, is to fry it and have all the edges be crispy, because, everyone knows, the crispy edges of the lasagna are the best part. As best we could tell, this had been given no more than a brief hit of heat on all four sides, and the only crispy bits were whatever had already been crispy from the original lasagna. It was also severely lacking in salt, though we admitted that could partially have been our palates being overwhelmed by the sharp tomato pesto.

Back in the 1930s, chef Nino Bergese created a dish at his restaurant in Genoa, and named it after himself. Basically, it was a spinach and cheese raviolon, a single giant raviolo, with a barely set egg yolk in the center. And accompanied by a white truffle and butter sauce. The dish disappeared for awhile, until he brought it back in the 70s, shortly before he passed on in 1977. Since then, the dish has shown up in many places around the world - here in Argentina it shows up quite often. Though - I’ve yet to see it with a white truffle and butter sauce - of course, we don’t have white truffles here. The version here was filled with shredded braised lamb and the egg yolk. But the whole thing is drowned in a mix of a spinach cream and spiced yogurt; and if you’re going to fry kale, fry it until it’s crisped up and crunchy.

I think in some ways, this was the most disappointing dish. Lorighittas, braided rings of pasta, in this case so undercooked they required noticeable chewing, a mere nine little cockles for the “clam sauce”, not even enough to really taste, and the sauce, a “white wine cream” was so buttery and heavy that it just left us feeling the same. I suppose the promised capers, dill, cilantro, and jalapeños were finely chopped up in the sauce, but we couldn’t really taste them. And the little bars of crunchy bread added nothing to the dish. Make it little bars of crunchy fried parmigiano and maybe. I know, I know, seafood and cheese - trust me, Italians put cheese on seafood in all sorts of dishes, the only people who get bent out of shape about the idea are Americans and Argentines. The latter is actually pretty funny given how much cheese they put on sushi.

It all just felt like no one was paying attention to quality, and probably not tasting things regularly to make sure they’re fine. I have trouble imagining, given the quality of his other restaurant, that Canga would have let some of those sauces pass the pass. I don’t know who runs the kitchen there, but they’re not paying attention. Might be why the Google rating has steadily declined over the last year or so (from 4.9 to 4.3).

Expensive - the two apps ran 19000 and 22000, the two main courses 35000 and 36000. The 9000 peso charge for water service, which was just filtered tap water, was rather excessive. This disappointing meal knocked us around for 121000 pesos plus tip, and the only part that was deserved was the tip. Not a place we’d go back to, nor recommend, sorry.