Chef Evan Funke of Los Angeles’ Felix Trattoria is an evangelist—not the stand-on-a-soapbox, preachy kind, but more a soft-spoken (albeit profanity-laced) proselytizer who lets his cooking do all the talking. And what it’s talking about is pasta, which Funke lives, breathes, and makes like the art form it is. “I've never been one to dabble,” the Bologna-trained master says. “I'm either one hundred percent in or one hundred percent out. And pasta making is like that to me.”
In part one of our interview, Funke talks about his introduction to Italian cooking, how he found his passion in Bologna, and why handmade pasta is all about the “life and bounce".
Tell us about yourself and how you got into the kitchen:
I kind of fell into cooking by accident. I did a lot of things before I found the kitchen and eventually signed up for the Marine Corp because I was just completely lost. About two weeks before I was to ship out to boot camp, the mother of the woman that I was dating, an exceptional Italian-American cook, said, “You know, why don't you go to culinary school?” It was like a snap. It was an epiphany.
So, I signed up to go to culinary school, and about three months into school I got a job with Wolfgang Puck at his catering facility in Hollywood; I stayed there for about 18 months and I got promoted to Spago in Beverly Hills. I stayed with Wolfgang from 2000 to 2006, and he kind of laid the foundation and the fundamentals that define the way that I run kitchens today.
Tagliatelle Al Ragù Della Vecchia Scuola - Tagliatelle with Maestra Alessandra's Meat Ragù (ph Eric Wolfinger)
After working with Wolfgang Puck, what got you into Italian cooking?
After Spago, I eventually took a terrible job at a hotel in Beverly Hills. The chef there was from Bologna and I really wanted to learn from him, but he didn’t teach me anything. It really pissed me off. So I said, you know what, I'm going to move to Bologna and learn from the horse's mouth. And that's exactly what I did. I found this website by a woman who had worked with the Maestra Alessandra Spisni, and I got ahold of them and said, “Hey, I’d love to come to make pasta with you as an apprentice.” And they said, “Sure, it'll be a thousand Euros. We will see you when you get here.”
When I was there, what ended up happening was all of the French and Asian techniques that were pounded into me at Spago just went out the window. I was immediately enamored with the way the Italians live and the way they cook and how they shop, and so I adopted this approach, this style of life because it immediately felt familiar to me. Like I had been born there at another time. It just felt supernatural, even though I didn't speak a lick of Italian.
Minestra Di Verdura Con Sorpresine - Sorpresine in Vegetable Broth (ph Eric Wolfinger)
What was the experience in Bologna like?
Bologna completely changed my entire outlook as a chef, and it changed my trajectory one hundred percent. I started to take on the perspective of the pasta maker versus the chef. I spent every waking moment that I had away from the school completely submerging myself in the culture and history, and it started this fire within me. Alessandra was the one who opened the door for me to continue down the path that I'm on today—which is seeking out pasta makers In Italy who are still practicing handmade pasta, and also seeking out rare, obscure and close to extinction pasta shapes and sitting with those people who are still practicing. I’m doing this so that I can become a tuning fork for the tradition, a custodian for the continuance of the history, because, as you know, there are fewer and fewer people interested in making pasta by hand.
So, I'm kind of offering myself up as this godson of pasta to these Nonna to allow me to continue the passage of technical and practical knowledge, and also the historical value and the anthropology behind the shapes. It’s not just the shapes, it's not just the know-how—it’s the history, the people, and the origin story that is the most important thing to me. So, that's my passion. That's my life's work.
Triangoli - Ripieno Di Zucca - Triangoli pasta with Butternut Squash Filling (ph Eric Wolfinger)
What is it about making pasta by hand that speaks to you in a different way? And are you anti pasta machine?
Well, first of all, I love doing things that are very difficult. The second thing, it's not about the extruder—the extruder has its place. To be considered an artisan or a craftsman, or to be considered proficient or excellent at your chosen field, one must embrace any and all relevant techniques within that chosen field. So, the extruder is in my restaurant.
My issue is with the pasta sheeter, and here's why: You make pasta by hand. You fold life into a ball of dough and with each fold you’re shaping and breathing air into it, creating a beautiful honeycomb structure of bubbles. It's like when you proof a loaf of bread and all that gluten structure has been made by your hand and then nature takes over and creates this amazing beautiful airy concoction–this mystery. And then what do you do with that beautiful ball of honeycombed air? You smash it through two rollers? What does it do? It de-gasses the entire product. It chokes the life out of it.
So, the difference between machine rolled pasta and a hand-rolled pasta made with the mattarello is that the mattarello takes that honeycomb of air pockets and redistributes them into smaller and smaller bubbles, so that the integrity of the structure never goes away—it has just gotten smaller and now it's on a microscopic scale. But if you pay attention, you can feel that texture. It still has life and bounce. That's why I dislike the machine so much, because people just make dough and then they slam it through. And what have you really achieved?