Festa Della Pasta? Its one way to make a festival as boring as a Pasta festival, sound interesting. I have professed my love for Prego many a times in this blog, but while they have done some awesome stuff like pairing perfume with food and things like that, a Pasta festival? But when Prego invites you, you go! Period. Probably the first Fine Dine Italian restaurant in Chennai, Prego has gotten over an identity crisis and is no longer a place you need to spend 8k per couple for dinner. While you can spend more than that with exotic wines and wines created specially for the Taj, you don't have to. A meal for two at Rs. 2500 is now possible!
Anyway, how else can you make a boring Pasta festival, interesting, besides calling it some fancy Italian name? Get the Italian chef to demonstrate how to make pasta. When Chef Luca, the resident Italian chef at Prego demonstrated how to make pasta with natural colours, like cocoa and parsley water, he had the audience spell bound. So, this is not for just select audience. Every one dining at Prego can have this little artisan view of pasta making. And when you end up eating the pasta, it turns heavenly.
So being a fancy place, you get amuse bouche, and this time it was a little spicy watermelon. Nothing special about it. Then course after course, Chef Luca made mouth watering after mouth watering stuff. Starting off with the super soft bread on the table, we were served a little potato. Tiny portions, but packed with flavour. Then came the fantastic soup. Leeks, but the awesome truffle! Oh my. Possibly the only place other than Pan Asian in ITC to serve truffle. And then a very nice sea food pasta, packed with flavour. So far so good. But then came the outstanding. A beef lasagna. Stunning would be an understatement. Layers of fantastic pasta with its own flavour, well cooked beef in layers dunked in pasta sauce. A teeny weeny bit of green sauce made of basil that added a complimenting flavour. And then another fantastic dish, the stuffed cheese ravioli. Wah, a veg dish that warmed our hearts. There were two pretty average dishes that I couldn't take more than a mouth of, the pizza and a stuffed chicken!
I also got taste other's food and I liked the veg Zucchini and Tomato Timbale which was topped off with some balsamic reduction, and I loved the fish too, but gladly saved space for dessert!!! Oh man. A deconstructed Tiramisu that tasted every bit like Tiramisu, without the lady finger biscuit, but had a little cake instead. But when you take a bite, it tasted every bit like the Tiramisu, with fabulous coffee, the mascarpone cheese cutting through the coffee. The cake was a good replacement for the lady finger biscuits and the dish is called the Luca's Tiramisu. The other dessert was a fantabulous bitter chocolate lasagna that has some crunchy stuff in-between the sheets! Pun intended.
While this festival is on till the 19th of this month, but Prego is here to stay! An even more amazing thing? Chef Luca is all of 27 years of age!!! Salut!
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