Bucatini All’ Amatriciana at Pastaria
Well, we’ve lost another good one, Nashville. Between Christmas and New Year’s, Pastaria served its last bowl of bolognese. There was little fanfare, but a lot of personal regret on my part. I’ll explain.
Pastaria is part of the St. Louis-based Niche Food Group, led by James Beard Award-winning chef Gerard Craft. Now that the Nashville Pastaria location has closed, their portfolio includes nine restaurants ranging from Italian to barbecue to a French brasserie. That sounds a lot like the current spate of hospitality groups from Chicago, Detroit and New York City that have Xeroxed concepts into new buildings in Nashville without contributing much to the soul of the city.
But I always felt like Chef Craft was different from the sort of chefs who keep their knives in a carpetbag. To the best of his ability, he sincerely sought to invest in the local community and bring value to the dining scene. As a way to introduce himself and his cooking to his new adopted city, he showed up at one of the earliest iterations of the Music City Food and Wine Festival in 2017 before he even opened his Nashville restaurant in September of that year. Opening night proceeds from the first meals at Pastaria benefited Southern Smoke, a fundraising event benefiting those affected by Hurricane Harvey in Houston earlier that year.
I also remember him joining a bunch of local chefs and pitmasters on a freezing-cold couple of mornings in the middle of Lower Broad, cooking free food for tourists visiting for the Music City Bowl. They did it for no other reason than they loved cooking together and feeding people.
He was always willing to help out at cooking events for Giving Kitchen, handing out samples himself from behind a folding table when some other notable local restaurants treated it more like a catering gig and sent just anybody to hold a tray of canapés. One year, I signed up for a University School Evening Class to learn how to make pasta at home and was pleasantly surprised to see Chef Craft at the kitchen island of some nice rich person who had volunteered to host a group of a dozen fledgling pastaiolos. He had traveled all the way from St. Louis on a random Tuesday night just to teach us how to make and roll pasta by hand, and my life has certainly been enriched by that!
Pastaria's grilled chicken
Here’s where the regret gets personal. We ordered often from Pastaria during the pandemic — either full dinners of that chopped salad with chickpeas, green olives, pistachios, pepperoni, oregano, pecorino and red wine vinaigrette that we copycat at least once a week along with an order of seasonal lasagna, or else the tagliatelle with Bolognese sauce and grana padano. If it had been a bad week (as so many were during 2020), we’d treat ourselves to a cannoli or two or maybe some gelato. Other times, we would order fresh pasta and usually a sauce to take home so we could feel like we were really cooking instead of just reheating in our COVID kitchen.
My household has a tradition around the holidays that we learned from a long-ago friend from when I was a part of the original Nashville blogosphere. She and her husband celebrated “Good Pizza and Little Cokes.” The idea was after the Christmas tree was up and decorated, and you just didn’t feel like fighting the grocery store or cooking, you treated yourself to a pizza and some Cokes. The pizza had to be better than what you would usually order, and the Cokes had to come in glass bottles, because that just tastes better.
This year, we decided that since we hadn’t been to Pastaria in person in a while, we’d let them be our holiday treat as we had several times in the past. But one thing led to another, and we got in a hurry and just GrubHubbed an inferior pie. [Sad trombone.]
“That’s OK,” I rationalized. “What I really want is some of that Bolognese anyway.” At the USN class, I learned that the inclusion of chicken livers is what makes the Pastaria version of the sauce authentic and amazing, and I still treasure the recipe card I got from Chef Craft that day.
When I heard about the closing, we were already out of town for New Year’s and couldn’t make it in for one last meal. We thought twice about it in December but didn’t go. And now look what we’ve gone and done!
I texted Chef Craft to offer my condolences and thank him for what he has meant to the community over the years. He responded: “It’s been an honor being a part of the Nashville restaurant community. I have met so many amazing people from our regulars, chefs and other restaurateurs that I will hopefully always stay in touch with. Nashville will always hold a special place in my heart.”
Speaking personally, the feeling is definitely mutual, chef. The bar at Pastaria was where I learned that I liked amaro and how many of them there were for me to experience, a quest that continues to this day. Since the bar was secluded from the main dining area, it was a great place to hole up for a happy hour and catch up with friends or blow off steam over a Ramazzotti after a rough day. I'll miss having a hip-pocket recommendation that satisfied requests for: 1. a place to eat with small kids; 2. a place for good, affordable Italian; 3. a place with copious free parking; 4. a place to sit at a pizza bar and stay warm from the heat of the wood oven while watching a master at work; 5. carryout gelato that would make you the most welcome guest at any dinner party.
So everybody, as you make resolutions and establish intentions for 2026, go visit that old favorite spot you've been thinking about. Make that Bolognese. Order that pizza. Support the restaurants you love, because tomorrow is certainly never guaranteed.
