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You can literally get your hands on traditionally-made Italian pasta right here in Brooklyn.
Pasta Class Florence is popping up at Nimbus, a commercial kitchen with a location in Downtown Brooklyn, at the end of February to teach New Yorkers how to make pasta from scratch and the recipes they pair the best with. The class is led by chefs visiting from Italy, so what you’re learning is straight from the people making these dishes in their place of origin.
On a 2022 trip to Italy, I was able to take the same hands-on pasta-making class with one of the Pasta Class Florence chefs, Michele Gualtieri, who worked in a Michelin-starred restaurant. The experience was a gift to my father-in-law for his birthday and we were going together as a family to learn how to make pasta by hand.
The three-hour course turned out to be the highlight of our visit and remains one of our favorite memories together. In the time following our trip, we’ve successfully made a few of the recipes for dinner parties to impress our guests.
After the class, Gualtieri mentioned that he had plans to come to New York City to start classes here, and I said that if he made it to NYC, I’d write about it. Two years later, he made his dream come true with the expansion to NYC.
So I signed up to take it again and see if its stateside iteration held up to my fond memories (and to say “hi” to Gualtieri). And good news, folks, it does.
@timeoutnewyork Chefs straight from Florence taught our Editor, Shaye Weaver, how to make delicious pasta at Nimbus in Brooklyn. 🍝
♬ Ghibli-style nostalgic waltz - MaSssuguMusic
The gregarious chefs—Gualtieri and Marco Benevento—made their guests Aperol spritzes to kick off the 10am class, which was a pleasant surprise. Set before each station was a mound of double-zero flour and two eggs. After giving a rundown of what the class would entail, we set to making our pasta dough.
The hardest part of the whole class was making the dough because it takes some arm strength and a little finesse to get your dough into an oval shape. However, the chefs shared their best tips and tricks to get the dough smooth and how to roll it out as thinly as possible before we cut and fold it into several different shapes. In total, we created pappardelle, tortelli, ravioli, tagliatelle and tagliolini and watched step-by-step how the chefs used them in several dishes, including a tomato sauce with burrata, a brown butter sage sauce with truffle oil, a beef ragu and pasta aglio olio with lime.
Each dish was beautiful in its own right and each bite took me back to Florence, a feeling intensified by the chef’s gorgeous Italian accents and jokes.
“We came to New York to bring the real Italian flavor to the city,” Gualtieri tells me during the class. “We want to spread our love for pasta! Most of our clients [in Italy] are from the U.S. We love this city and it was a nice way to come to the city and do something different than just visit. This way, we can share traditional Italian pasta.”
Brooklyn is the right spot for this kind of cultural exchange. After all, it’s known for its large Italian-American population and its Italian restaurants, including Frankies 457 Spuntino, Lucali, Roman’s, Lillo and Al di Là.
But Nimbus, the commercial kitchen it takes place in, is a great space for the class. It launched in 2019 and subsequently three locations in Manhattan and one in downtown Brooklyn with the hopes of being a space for chefs across the city to kind of dip their toes in the culinary waters of NYC before jumping in whole hog.
Not only does it do long-term and short-term commercial kitchen rentals, but it also has regular events hosted by chefs, like James Beard award-winner Cristina Martinez and South Philly Barbacoa who recently did a three-month pop-up on the weekends at Nimbus. Top Chef winner Buddha Lo held a 10-course caviar tasting menu to raise money for Chefs 4 Impact, an organization that teaches children about nutrition.
Pasta Class Florence will be back at the end of this month and in March—and hopefully throughout 2024. Make sure to follow Nimbus on Instagram to keep up with its culinary events and Pasta Class Florence on when you can try the class for yourself.
