Comedian Matteo Lane On Why Your Pasta Sucks

JH: And it has to be clean.

ML: It has to be clean, I know. My sister and I, we usually make homemade ravioli for Christmas. I put that in the book as well.

JH: Yeah, I saw that.

ML: She has enough space, she has an island, so we can just lay out the pasta, and then we make the homemade ricotta. Then we can just dollop it and fold it. The more space you have, the easier it is.

My friend, Chef Marco, he’s a huge chef on Instagram, he’s amazing. He’ll come over to my apartment just on a random night. We’re like, “Okay, we’re going to cook gnocchi tonight.” We made spinach ricotta gnocchi. My counter is full of flour and he’s very messy. He’s like, “Okay, yeah, we’ll make it well. Okay, it’s fine.” I’m like the nervous person cleaning behind him. Yeah, sometimes the space is necessary.

JH: I don’t know if you’ve observed this with your friends who don’t cook, but I certainly have. Everybody uses the smallest knife available, the smallest cutting board.

ML: Yeah.

JH: Use the big stuff.

ML: Well, my friend Nick has no talent.

JH: Yeah.

ML: He can’t cook anything. He can’t even make a smoothie. He somehow managed to take good ingredients, when blended together, he ruined it. He can’t cook for shit and he can’t bake. He has no interest in it. Watching him do it, he has full panic attacks. He looks like a woman sinking on the Titanic, that’s the behavior he has when he’s cooking. I’ve tried so hard to teach him, he has zero interest in it. But then, he likes my cooking.

JH: Right.

ML: He won’t say it, but he’s like, “Are you going to make that cacio e pepe again?

JH: Right.

ML: I’m like, yes. “Okay.” He’ll eat it.

JH: Also, a great Squidward voice.

ML: He literally sounds like that. Hello. That’s Nick’s voice. It sounds like Squidward.

JH: Circling back to the cookbook real quick, you wrote in the intro, “Carbonara is the reason this cookbook exists.”

ML: Yes.

JH: Is that your favorite pasta?

ML: Yes, yes. Yes, with an ellipses.

JH: Okay.

ML: It just depends. My favorite pasta could be pasta de la mama because that’s my favorite thing my mom made when we were kids. I also just every time I eat at Zi Umberto in Trastevere Roma, when I eat the bucatini amatriciana, I don’t know what they’re doing because I’ve asked the whole staff, they all know me now. Every staff member has given me a different reason why the pasta is so good. Last summer he said, “Our fire.” I was like, “I don’t think that the heat is changing … Fine, whatever.”

JH: Right, right.

ML: Whatever, they’re just Italian. They’re all smoking on the table while we’re ordering food. But then, it can come down to I love struffoli at Christmastime, it just invokes so much memory. When I eat it, it reminds me of my great-grandmother.