Chef Evan Funke on the Art of Making Pasta | Joe Rogan

You guys have put together is pretty remarkable. Thank you. The food there is so good. It's kind of ridiculous. Like, your pasta's got voodoo in it. I don't know what you're doing. It is voodoo. And I guess it's because it's handmade, right? Because the first time my wife and I ate there, we sat right next to that open area where you can watch you guys make the pasta. And it's such a painstaking process. And you realize, you really, truly appreciate that it's an art form. You know, that like making stuff like that, like cutting no corners and making it as good as it could possibly taste. Well, I mean, that's the ultimate goal is to create that connection between pasta maker and someone who's eating the pasta. Like if you look through the glass and you see a pastaio or pastaia in there banging out. What's the difference of pastaio? Pastaio is male. Gender neutral. Yeah. You know, they're banging out trophy, which is like a coil from Lugoria. And you look down at your plate and there's like 160 to 180 pieces in your plate. You're like, fuck. This guy's wrapping. Is this from your ear? Yeah. He's got pictures of it. This guy's doing 180 reps just for me. That's a connection. And once you get it, sometimes a bowl of pasta is a bowl of pasta. I get it. But this is something different. This is this is craft. This is tradition. This is continuing this conversation of that's been passed down from generation to generation. And all I'm doing, all we're doing at Felix is just a small spoken in a massive wheel of Italian culinary tradition. Well, you know just exactly how long to cook it to, which is amazing. Like the bite. Because I'm fucking maniacal. I get it, man. You must be. Because the just the way your teeth sink into it, it's like everything is amazing. I like to call it toothsome. That's what I'll dente means to the tooth. Is that what it means? Oh, dental. Oh, okay. Yeah. Toothsome. So that's part of the experience, right? Is the right amount of chew. Just the amount of chew. Each pasta is cooked region specific because they cook pasta very different in Naples versus Rome versus Bologna. What is the difference? It's just preference. It's based on tradition. The thing is this. Authenticity is very personal, right? Your mom makes macaroni and cheese with Velveeta. My mom makes macaroni and cheese with Tillamook cheddar. That shit's authentic to me. It may not be authentic to you. Italy is no different. But the differences and the diversity are so specific, not only per region, but town and then house to house. And it's been that way for thousands of years. That's why I think Italian food next to Chinese food is the most diverse there is. And you could literally study your whole life and not even scratch the surface. Yeah. Not every chef operates from being an artist and there's different levels of food. I do have to say, Evan is an absolute master. He's, Evan's obviously not Italian, but has studied all over Italy and it's really the dying art of handmade pasta. And Evan is a custodian of keeping this art alive. He's a maestro. He's unbelievable. Is there a specific type of flour that you use? We import six different types from four different regions. And now is the word about pasta and about bread and wheat in general, is that American wheat is a different kind of wheat. It's a different kind of wheat. It's also processed completely different. I don't use a lot of American wheat just because it's just been manipulated so much. And a lot of the digestibility of, in my opinion, people are going to freak out, but in my opinion, the amount of work that goes into denaturing pasta in order to get it flat via machine has a lot to do with its digestibility. Just like sourdough bread is more digestible because it's broken down in a different way. So handmade pasta is less manipulated than machine made pasta, in my opinion. So also the types of wheat, the amount of wheat germ that's in it, the nutritional value at all has to do with those elements within the flour. And to be honest, I've developed a gluten intolerance because I've been breathing raw flour for the past 12 years. Oh, really? As soon as I step foot in the lab and I start rolling as folio, my stomach just starts, it's acid straight up. That's crazy, just from the powder. Because I've been breathing raw. Yeah. Wow. Because it's like talcum. Double zero flour is extremely fine, so we have to throw it in order to put some on the table to roll it out. So you breathe it in all day long. We've got extractors, we've got humidity control and air conditioning and all that, but still. So you've developed an intolerance because of that? It's called white lung or baker's lung. Baker's lung. So do you wear a mask? I do not. Why don't you wear a mask? I don't know. Suck it out. I don't know. It seems like that would be a good thing to do. Sure. You don't want that baker's lung, right? I don't like masks. Oh, okay. You'd rather have a baker's lung? This whole experience has been very enlightening, wearing a mask. Right. Yeah, it's gross. Another friend who also has a kozuku kawamura who is instrumental in my kind of understanding of modern pasta. I met him in Bologna, a Japanese guy who has a lab in Tokyo called Base. And he has the same thing. He wears a mask all the time because he's just breathing in raw flour all day. I never would have thought of that, but it makes total sense. I never thought, oh yeah. Hmm. Yeah, I mean, fucking flour. It's like a guy works at a paint shop. Like you're going to get sick. You got to get one of the painter things, the big tubes. That'd be so weird. People be like, I'm not eating that fucking pasta. I don't know. For me, it's part of the experience. It's crazy. What's in there? It's preservatives, man. Well, whatever you're doing, keep doing it. It's the white lung, whatever you got. Clean that shit out. Whatever it takes. I don't know what you can do to get that flour out of you. Baker's lung, just keep going. Yeah, it's just the pasta is insane. It's so good. When you have really good pasta and then you have pasta that maybe you enjoyed before, you had the really good pasta, it's like having water in your ear. It fucks people up. Yeah, it fucks people up. It does. Sure. I cannot tell you how many people DM me or come to me into the restaurant and they say, you've completely fucking ruined me. Thank you so much. Now I can't eat pasta anywhere else. I don't eat pasta in North America whatsoever. I don't eat fresh pasta in North America. I only eat pasta in Italy. I eat dried pasta in America, but I don't eat fresh pasta. Why not? Most people don't know what they're doing. But there's got to be some people other than you guys. No, certainly, absolutely. What are good spots? I think Miss Robbins is exceptional. Where's that? New York City. Oh, Brooklyn. Oh, okay. Damn, you guys go all the way to Brooklyn? Rob Gentile in Toronto is great. So there's a very small amount of people that are doing it right. There's a handful of people who make pasta by hand, period. And even fewer people who know how to make pasta with the mozzarella, which is the long rolling pin. Even fewer. And when I started, I started doing this 11 years ago, there was nobody. There was nobody. I checked. You know, I moved to Bologna in 2007, tail end of 2007, and started this journey with my maestra Alessandro Spisny, a Lovelac, Escuela Bolognese. And she kind of opened up the door for me to start seeking out other pasta makers throughout Italy. And when I came back in 08, I ran a restaurant called Rustic Canyon for about four years. And you know, not a lot of people were serving this style of pasta that I wanted to serve. And so I started giving it away like a gateway drug. I was just like, sent at the tables for free. And they're like, what the fuck? And it just started gaining momentum and gaining momentum. Wow. So, so when you moved to Italy to learn how to do like, what is it apprenticeship like in, you know, learning how to make pasta? I mean, it's an apprenticeship. You have to put yourself in the in the student's chair and be a sponge. I didn't speak any not a lick of Italian. But the Italians are very expressive. So you're able to communicate through just being Italian, I guess. And I spent three months, you know, six days a week, 10 hours a day just making pasta. Wow. Period. See, this is what's fascinating to me things you just you just take for granted. Oh, here is a plate of pasta. Like, but what what is involved in learning how to make it that good? It's not just ingredients. When people sit down at a restaurant, people aren't just paying for for the experience of sitting there and the cost of food. They're they're paying for the experience of the people that are making the food. That's a big part of it. That's the way that I look at it. And 11 years of making pasta by hand, there's a lot of depth that some of the younger guys just aren't willing to pay the time cost. And a lot of the younger cooks out there, they bounce around from job to job six months here, three months here, and they think that they've mastered it. But there's just no depth. There's no depth. You know, you have to also consider how labor intensive it is to, you know, hand roll out the pasta and you know what Evan was saying before, like each one rolled by hand, you know, when you eat a bowl of pasta, you're not thinking that each one was like pressed out by hand. So it's like extremely labor intensive. And a lot of people, when we were opening, Evan did have his own restaurant, Bucato before, which was also basically focused around pasta as well. That's a whole other story. But when we were going to open up this restaurant and we put in the middle of the restaurant the temperature controlled pasta lab, which is taking up tables. So if you're a business person, a restaurateur, you say, how many tables could fit in there? How much is each table worth to your bottom line? You're using up that space to put in, you're using that space to put in a pasta lab. Are you crazy? Also, you know, when you're thinking about, you know, training the people and how labor intensive it is, people were saying like, we're crazy doing this again. Yeah, they didn't think we could make money. Yeah. Well, it is a lot of space. That pasta lab is a big space, but it's so cool to be sitting right there. It's a showstopper. Yeah, it really it's something special. Thank you.