20 Questions with LaRina Pastificio & Vino’s Silvia Barban
In the Resy Questionnaire, we play a game of 20 questions with the industry folks behind some of our favorite restaurants. What’s your most memorable restaurant experience? Your favorite food movie? What restaurant would you want to time-travel for?
In this edition, we spoke to Silvia Barban, the owner and chef of LaRina Pastificio & Vino and Briscola Trattoria in Brooklyn, New York. You might also recognize her from “Top Chef” season 14 (2016).
The Resy Questionnaire
The Resy Questionnaire
1. Favorite thing you’ve ever cooked?
My favorite thing to cook is pasta, from the dough to the sauce, every single part.
2. Kitchen tool or equipment you couldn’t live without?
A sharp and great knife.
3. What five culinary items would you bring on a desert island?
Lemon, extra virgin olive oil, Calabrian chiles, salt, and basil.
4. What’s your favorite place to get a slice in New York?
Impasto pizza is my favorite; it’s a Roman-style pizza.
5. Favorite cookbook?
I have two and they are very different: Gualtiero Marchesi’s La Cucina Italiana, and [Birdie G’s chef] Jeremy Fox’s On Vegetables.
6. Your drink of choice?
A super dirty gin martini.
7. Favorite food movie?
“Big Night” or “Julie and Julia.”
8. Which industry people, living or dead, would you love to cook for or have over for a dinner party?
Gualtiero Marchesi, my mentor and the chef who hired me for my first important job. And all my “Top Chef” friends.
9. What restaurant industry person do you admire the most?
My dear friend Shirley Chung. Right now she is fighting tongue cancer, and she is an amazing chef and person and so talented. She is a fighter, and I admire her so much for all of the fights and all of the things she is going through in life.
10. What’s been the greatest restaurant experience of your life so far?
My greatest restaurant experience was working for Giancarlo Perbellini in his Michelin-starred restaurant, Casa Perbellini. Being able to learn from him and experience different realities with him while cooking at events with the best chefs from Italy, or going to Thailand or Bangkok, is something I’ll never forget.
11. Your greatest professional achievement?
Opening two restaurants and still standing, ha.
Also, all the relationships I’ve made. I think a lot of my success is connected to all the connections and friendships I’ve made, and things I have learned from them that I maybe would not have. And I hope I also helped them by leaving little parts of me, too.
12. What single dish best describes your personality?
Smoked spaghetti aglio e olio, a.k.a. my life in a bowl. Smoked spaghetti made in house represents my life in America, Calabrian chiles for my Calabrian origins, and hazelnuts because they represent my time in Piedmont, studying cooking.
13. If you could go back in time, which restaurant would you dine at?
The great Prune when chef Gabrielle Hamilton was in the kitchen. I’ve been and it was wonderful, but I never had that chance to go when chef Gabrielle was cooking there.
14. Your favorite meal from childhood?
My grandmother’s roasted potatoes.
15. What is your wish for the restaurant industry?
I wish the industry from the front of house to back of house was more appreciated and respected and to have a more sustainable career path. I’d love to see the industry be less toxic, less a culture of working to the bone, and having more fair compensation. A good restaurant shouldn’t have to weigh the possibility of staying open and being able to pay living wages and benefits to employees. A lot of times it seems like you have to be a restaurant with a never-ending waitlist, or have a huge restaurant group behind you to be able to do that and to not always worry.
16. What do you wish you did better? What do you do well?
Taking time for myself and my family. Something I do well is taking care of other people.
17. If you could eat through a city for a day, where would you go?
Osaka, Japan, because I’ve never been before, or simply in any place in Italy.
18. The one thing you can’t resist splurging on when you go out?
A good dinner. There isn’t any one specific thing. I will be OK to spend whatever I need to on just a really really good meal.
19. What do you value most in restaurants?
I value fresh and good quality ingredients and passion in a project.
20. It’s your last meal on earth, what are you eating?
I’m eating my mom’s eggplant parmigiana.
