It is a weekday lunchtime and I am sitting in a restaurant over a plate of pasta. It is not just any old pasta. There is a smooth layer of tiny, curling macaroni, resting within the golden sheen of a meaty reduced jus, and laid across the top are various plush accessories. This is the “coquillette cooked like risotto” with “bone marrow and Prunier Oscietra caviar”, served to me at Pavyllon, inside London’s Four Seasons hotel by Hyde Park Corner. It belongs to uber chef Yannick Alléno who has 17 Michelin stars worldwide, one of which is held here. The price: £49, for what turns out to be just a single layer of macaroni in the flat plate’s circular well. It is, to be fair, utterly delicious. Every tiny spoonful is rich and sticky and salty, the soft bone marrow lubricating the tiny al dente tubes, the caviar bringing bursts of brine and surf. But however fabulous it might be, and however luxurious, it really isn’t much pasta.
It’s a little bewildering. Pasta is what we feed our kids when they need a quick bowl of something comforting and sustaining. It’s what we feed ourselves at the end of a long day at work, when the idea of cooking anything more complicated saps the will. It is the most domestic of dishes. And yet, alongside this humble tradition, this story of the everyday, it also seems to have become the fanciest of dishes. Bacchanalia, just off London’s Berkeley Square, serves a lobster paccheri pasta with black truffle and a creamy bisque sauce for £68; at the Bvlgari Hotel, Tokyo they serve “fettucelle with lobster and prawns” for ¥11,500 or £60. At Al Muntaha, the Italian restaurant on the 27th floor of the sail-like Burg Al Arab hotel in Dubai, there’s the Yquem Lighthouse Pasta with bluefin tuna and mango pearls for AED750, or £150 (although that does include a glass of 2021 d’Yquem). Scan the menus of smart restaurants worldwide and you’ll find pasta dishes accessorised with bottarga, the hyper luxe dried roe of the grey mullet, or pelted with caviar, lobster and the rest, priced like drams of obscure, cask-aged whiskies.
