If you frequent these boards, you may be aware of my affinity for Italian food (particularly pasta) as well as one particular shrine to noodles and sauce, UOVO.
The noodles are handmade in Bologna and flown in every night. The ingredients are proper and high quality - they’re using guanciale, not pancetta or bacon. Everything is cooked with timers, so you get the same consistency every time you visit. 16% service fee, no tipping. No reservations. They’re turning tables fast, but never rushing you out. (It shares common ownership with Sugarfish, Kazunori, and HiHo, if the clues didn’t give it away).
And the prices…nearly everything is under $20. It’s the most reasonably priced high quality restaurant pasta in Los Angeles. I hear many people compare UOVO to Pasta Sisters, perhaps because they’re at a similar price point and have a similar casual pasta service model. But that comparison is so unfair to UOVO, whih is both less expensive and significantly better.
But even setting aside the cost, I genuinely think it’s some of the best pasta in Los Angeles. And I’m in some fine company with that opinion; the late Jonathan Gold said that UOVO’s amatriciana “may just be the best dish of its kind in town”.
Since the first UOVO opened in downtown Santa Monica nearly 10 years ago, I’ve surely dined across all the locations pushing 50 times, and have tried nearly every dish. And while I could review most dishes from memory, where’s the fun in that?
So to celebrate UOVO as it comes up on its 10-year anniversary, and as an excuse for me to eat more pasta, I will be ordering each pasta anew, one at a time, reviewing them here as I go.
Handmade tonnarelli with egg, imported Italian guanciale (pork), 24-month aged Parmigiano-Reggiano, Pecorino Romano DOP & our blend of imported black pepper.
The magic of UOVO’s carbonara is that it has the most perfect emulsified consistency of any restaurant carbonara in Los Angeles, if not the country. I cook carbonara not infrequently and my sauce is always either a little runnier or a little thicker, but rarely does it get close to the perfect silkiness of UOVO’s carbonara. What’s also impressive and befuddling about UOVO’s carbonara, is that, unlike most carbonara, the sauce does not quickly thicken the dish into an unappetizing clump of noodles. However they do it, the sauce is able to maintain its consistency for an inordinate amount of time.
The caronbara is finished table-side with a dollop of parmigiano reggiano and a few turns of black pepper. From the first bite you get the perfect just-al-dente (not Evan Funke level of al dente) chew, the delicious egg-forward sauce, and, occasionally, some of the perfectly cooked guanciale. The guanciale has a medium intensity porcine flavor, slightly more delicate than say the guanciale at a place like Torrisi.
There’s just not enough of the guanciale, which makes it less salty and porcine-forward than a typical carbonara, a slight knock to my taste. The pepper, too, could be kicked up just a notch. A little more guanciale, a little more pepper, a little more cheese even, and I would score it at least half a point higher.
Looking forward to this rundown! I went once to the Santa Monica location shortly after it opened and it was quite good. But I am around Sunday Gravy more and they tend to be my first Choice for pasta. However, with the new D line extension, Uovo also has a mid Wilshire location which is very train friendly.
Others have covered it but Uovo is remarkably consistent across locations, Pasadena certainly included. It’s an integral part of the Jerry Greenberg (founder & partner of UOVO, Sugarfish, KazuNori, HiHo, Matū) ethos.
In this article about opening the first New York location of UOVO, you see a glimpse of that attention to detail:
"There’s one big detail that Uovo is working out as it prepares to open in New York. An important part of the process is having pasta rest while it’s in transit. Because flights to New York are shorter than they are to L.A., Uovo is looking at how and when to add resting time for its pasta. Rest assured, the Massiminis and Greenberg won’t be satisfied until they get this exactly right.
It’s a bit hard for me to believe that they couldn’t make equally good fresh pasta in-house. Good food is one thing but in today’s world carbon footprint us hard to ignore
The original plan for Uovo was to ship over Italian eggs with rich red yolks that are optimal for pasta. Once the team realized this wasn’t possible, they put together a Bologna kitchen and tapped chef Pino Mastrangelo and pasta-maker Stefania Randi to run it.
From the same article. I can’t say whether Italian eggs make a genuine difference in taste or consistency compared to domestic eggs, but it’s certainly plausible.
Plenty of restaurants in LA & SF (I believe you live in SF?) - particularly but not exclusively high end ones - are importing ingredients small and large, but I don’t recall seeing you make this criticism of another restaurant in the past. Please correct me if i’m wrong.
What, then, makes UOVO the target here? Is it because UOVO is a “casual” spot rather than a “high-end” spot, that you don’t find the rationale for importing compelling?
I also don’t think that a number of other restaurants in LA or SF or anywhere in the US are doing the right thing from an environmental point to import a lot of things from far away that could be produced/foraged/made in the US with not much (or any) quality issues. But Inalso think that Uovo is a bit more extreme as their main business model/focus is pasta and so they are shipping not only some ingredients from Italy but their business foundation.
Something like Epicurus is an interesting discussion point as they provide access to things which often can’t be easily reproduced in the US and are separate for me from restaurants - but eben there one could have a serious discussion if we need our special cheese/chocolate/fish tin etc etc imported from far away.
carbon footprint of some pastas is pretty irrelevant vs what most of the world’s corporations do to ruin this planet. It’s like guilting an individual for not recycling when one large corporation would probably offset an entire planets collective effort to recycle their coke cans.
also labor and cost of goods is cheaper I assume in Italy for the same quality or skills.
Not only in this specific case but in general, I find it always a strange argument that because somebody else bigger is doing something reprehensible everybody else smaller is fine to do the same
You do realize, of course, how freight shipping works. The pasta may be flown in every night, but it’s traveling as part of a much larger cargo load along with countless other products. Each bundle of pasta isn’t exactly getting a seat assignment on ITA Air.
To your main concern, of course there’s an environmental cost. But there’s also tremendous marketing value in being able to say your pasta is handmade in Bologna and flown in daily. I know that claim brought me in the door when they first opened in Santa Monica.
