Husband and wife chefs Scott Tacinelli and Angie Rito have a knack for eye-popping food. For Quality Italian, they created the chicken Parm pizza, a giant disc of poultry smothered in bubbly, golden cheese that’s like a finance titan’s idea of Sunday gravy. The duo spent time working on a smaller scale at East Village bar Dinnertable and running a noodle-centric pop-up called Pasta Omakase, all the while honing their playful, boisterous approach to Italian-American cooking. They’ll continue down that red-sauce-paved path with Don Angie, which opens tonight in the West Village.
Tacinelli and Rito have a clear fondness for pasta, and the menu features a signature of theirs in the lasagna for two they first served at Dinnertable. But one dish also features a technique rarely seen in this city: two-toned dough. The fear, of course, is that this could be leading to rainbow spaghetti and galaxy orecchiette, but it’s a cool and appealing technique. In this case, the candy-wrapper-looking caramelle pasta are given zebra strips from black sesame and intertwined so that it doesn’t look all that unlike an old-school candy. It’s filled not with sugar but seasoned Italian buffalo-milk ricotta and with a brown butter sauce, honey-pickled persimmon, shallot, black sesame puree, and opal basil.
