The Biggest Food Trend of 2024 is Mashup Pastas

Almost anything goes when it comes to mashup pastas. Call it modern-day fusion, call it a multi-national mishmash, call it cross-cultural cavatelli collisions — restaurants across America are using classic Italian pastas to showcase decidedly non-Italian flavors, ingredients, and dishes. 

Mashup pastas are nothing new. As long as borders and pasta have existed, so have border-bending pastas. People in countries across the globe have long embraced Italian noodles and put local spins on them, incorporating the results into the regional cuisine. See Haitian espageti made with peppers and hot dogs or herring — chef Gregory Gourdet serves a version of this at his restaurant, Kann, in Portland, Oregon.

And then there’s Filipino spaghetti made with banana ketchup and smoked longganisa sausages, makarony po-flotski — navy-style macaroni from Russia with ground meat and onions, and Somali suugo suqaar — spaghetti with a Xawaash-spiced meat sauce. Itameshi, a fusion cuisine which  blends Japanese and Italian flavors, has existed in Japan since the 1920s and has led to innovative pasta creations such as soy butter bigoli and uni spaghetti at Kimika in New York City.

But over the past year, we’ve seen more and more chefs lean on the diverse influences of their upbringing and surroundings in order to create entirely original mashup pastas. 

To Donald Hawk, chef of Valentine in Phoenix, Arizona, pasta is “the biggest blank canvas ever.” Combining the flavors of cacio e pepe and Mexican street corn, Hawk serves an elote pasta made with hand-made tagliarini, crispy coal-roasted corn, dried arbol flakes, local asiago cheese, and “Goatija” instead of Cotija. “Made with goats milk from a local guy,” he says. The dish has been on Valentine’s menu since it opened in 2021. “I think there would be a riot if we took it off.”

At Marie’s in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, chef Miguel Trinidad calls his cuisine “​​Italian-inspired with a New York City edge,” so the menu naturally includes things like Jamaican lamb patty ragu and duck ropa vieja cappelletti. “When it came to Marie’s, the inspiration was eating with my in-laws,” says Trinidad. “My wife is Italian and I’m Dominican.” The other influence was Brooklyn itself. “I wanted to pay respect to the flavors of the neighborhood in Bushwick. This area was [historically and] predominantly Hispanic, Dominican, Ecuadorian, Mexican, and Salvadorian.” 

The menu has a chopped cheese raviolo — what Trinidad describes as his love letter to Brooklyn — that’s a riff on the cult-favorite bodega deli sandwich.  And while the raviolo’s filling includes dry-aged beef and an egg yolk, he’s staying “true to the flavors of a chopped cheese” with the addition of white American cheese. To Trinidad, the mashup pasta has always been around, including a Dominican spaghetti with smoked ham and tomato paste that his mom used to make. “Who doesn’t love pasta?” he asks. “Every culture has some type of noodle dish that is some type of comfort food,” he says. “And why not use that vessel as a way to introduce new flavors?”

The epicenter of the mashup pasta trend seems to be in Los Angeles, one of the most culturally diverse cities in the United States. There are the inventive Italian-Asian pastas at Poltergeist like broccoli beef ravioli and green curry bucatino, and the Indian-inspired malai rigatoni at Pijja Palace, a riff on rigatoni alla vodka but with tomato masala, cream, and coriander.

At self-described “Mexitalian” restaurant Amiga Amore, chef and co-owner Danielle Duran Zucca serves Mexican-Italian fusion, with dishes you probably won’t find anywhere else, like a huitlacoche cacio e pepe, a chile colorado cavatelli, or the aptly-named “Duck Duck Duck” dish, made with an epazote-parsley linguine, duck carnitas, duck gravy, and crispy duck skin.

“It’s my story on a plate,” says Amiga Amore chef Danielle Duran Zecca. She’s Mexican and her husband is Italian, and she has found so many similarities between the two cuisines — like how they both rely heavily on tomatoes and how queso requesón and ricotta are “almost the same in flavor and texture.” Connecting these dots, especially through pasta, was inevitable. “Pasta is such an open vehicle for taking on many flavors.” 

Then at the boundary-pushing Thai restaurant, Holy Basil, chef Deau Wedchayan serves yellow curry rigatoni. The warm Kaeng Kari yellow curry, which has Indian, Thai, and Chinese influences, is built with a scratch-made curry paste, and it all gets topped with Szechuan peppercorns for some extra pop. Instead of using egg noodles like you might find in a Khao Soi, the Thai coconut curry noodle soup, Arpapornnopparat prefers the texture and shape of rigatoni. “I like how it captures the sauce unlike egg noodles,” he says, which would make the dish too starchy.

For Arpapornnopparat, pasta is just another foundation to work with — a canvas to build flavors around. “You see ramen done in so many ways. Rice done so many ways. Pasta is just another blank slate.”