How NYC’s Don Angie Makes a Famous Lasagna Dish
One of NYC’s busiest restaurants is Don Angie, run by husband-and-wife duo Scott Tacinelli and Angie Rito. On top of serving an internet-famous lasagna for two, the restaurant serves whole roasted lobster, buffalo milk caramelle, a chrysanthemum salad, and more.
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00:00 - So this is what we make pretty much like on a daily basis,
00:02 our three different kinds, four different kinds of dough.
00:05 Basically 100 sheets of lasagna every day.
00:07 And it's a lot, I mean if you pick this thing up,
00:09 I don't even know, it probably weighs 30 pounds maybe.
00:13 - I mean the crazy thing is we almost
00:15 didn't put the lasagna on the menu.
00:17 And now it's like the thing that
00:19 everybody comes to the restaurant for.
00:21 - What's unique about this restaurant,
00:22 every single one of our pastas--
00:24 - Is handmade.
00:25 - There is a bit of like an Instagram curse
00:27 with this lasagna dish.
00:29 - It's not like we like developed it to be photographed.
00:31 It just so happened that people ended up
00:33 liking taking photos of it.
00:35 The rest was history I guess.
00:36 - What I do is I fold it like this.
00:39 And you can see how long this thing has gotten
00:41 'cause we just made it super thin, right?
00:43 Straighten it out and then we make each one about 12 inches.
00:46 And then what I do is I fold them all on top of each other.
00:48 And again this is just one step in making lasagna.
00:52 It's insane like the amount of work that goes into it.
00:54 If you're gonna make fresh pasta,
00:55 there's no other way to do it.
00:56 Now we're gonna cut and then you end up with the sheets.
00:59 These sheets are for tomorrow.
01:01 Once we're done sheeting, we're gonna wrap them,
01:03 put them in the walk-in,
01:04 and then we're gonna take out the ones she made yesterday
01:06 and start blanching them.
01:07 We have to blanch each sheet individually
01:12 and there's no other way to do it.
01:13 And this is boiling very, very heavily salted water
01:15 because we're imparting that seasoning into the pasta.
01:19 And then salted ice water too to like reinforce,
01:22 'cause if you just use salted boiling water
01:23 then you put it into unsalted ice water,
01:25 it just basically washes out all the salt.
01:27 So salted, salted.
01:30 It literally takes probably two hours every day
01:33 of someone just doing this.
01:35 We only ran out of it once
01:37 and it was like the first week we were open I think, right?
01:39 - Yeah.
01:40 - But since we did that,
01:41 we always put on the menu limited availability
01:44 just in case something ever happens.
01:47 But it's never happened since then, so.
01:49 (upbeat music)
01:51 (metal clanking)
01:54 - I'm out.
02:04 - So this is Chef Denver, he's our executive sous chef.
02:07 He's been holding down the fort this morning.
02:09 He's gonna show us how to make the lobster butter.
02:12 - We use two things for it.
02:13 So the first one, the tail will be used as a lobster meatball
02:16 that goes as well with the pasta.
02:19 And then on top of that would be the lobster butter,
02:20 which we'll be using the lobster butter.
02:22 The liquid gold in our restaurant, so.
02:26 What we wanna do is just transfer everything here.
02:28 So we have the garlic, the Calabrian chili,
02:30 and also the butter that we'll be using for this one.
02:33 First thing, we'll be putting in the butter.
02:35 So this is total of four pounds of butter.
02:39 Before here, I was working in Panda Express
02:40 and then started here not knowing how kitchen runs.
02:44 And we work our way from there.
02:46 Right now that everything's in there,
02:48 we basically just let it simmer for about two hours.
02:51 And then after that, we strain it to a chinois.
02:53 And then after the chinois, we pass it through
02:55 a coffee filter, so make sure everything's ready.
02:58 And then that's when we store it in cups in the freezer.
03:00 And then whenever we need, we take it out.
03:03 - Now I'm gonna stuff the lobsters for tonight.
03:05 This is like the main element of our lobster for two dish.
03:09 It's a two pound lobster that we basically prepare
03:13 kind of like Thermador style.
03:15 Quickly blanch them just to like get the meat
03:18 to detach from the shell.
03:20 And we remove the meat, we chop it up,
03:22 and then we mix it with our smoked vodka sauce.
03:25 We often joke that this is basically like,
03:28 I don't know, like a cheese restaurant.
03:29 I mean, just like the amount of like dairy
03:31 that we go through in this restaurant, it's pretty wild.
03:34 So this is gonna then get baked for like,
03:38 I don't know, 12 minutes.
03:40 So there's a ton of effort that goes into this in advance.
03:44 During service, like comes together relatively quickly.
03:47 We're just basically gonna like roast off this lobster.
03:51 It's like the most expensive thing on the menu basically.
03:54 We only make a few a night.
03:55 - So our next major project that we do
04:00 almost every day of the week is our caramelly pasta.
04:03 It's two different types of dough.
04:04 So we use our classic egg dough that we use for lasagna,
04:08 as well as we use a black sesame dough.
04:11 And then Carmen cuts it into strips
04:13 and we basically apply it to the top of the egg dough.
04:16 The whole idea is that it gives it like a tie dye effect.
04:20 When I make it, they don't look as nice
04:22 as when Carmen makes it.
04:24 Carmen, do you ever do a specific pattern
04:26 based on your mood of the day?
04:28 - Is there like subliminal messages in the caramelly?
04:29 - No.
04:30 You don't write like, I hate Chef Scott
04:33 or anything like that?
04:33 - No.
04:34 (laughing)
04:36 I love Chef Scott.
04:37 - Oh, thank you.
04:38 Thank you, Carmen.
04:41 (laughing)
04:44 Carmen's worked with us since day one.
04:45 She's literally touched every single piece of pasta
04:49 in this restaurant, except for when she goes on vacation.
04:52 Then I touch the pieces of pasta.
04:54 So she's gonna start sheeting it
04:56 and she's gonna put it through once
04:57 and then click it and make it smaller.
04:58 And it's gonna look awesome when she starts going through.
05:01 It's gonna just explode with all the different colors
05:04 and kind of like takes life
05:05 and looks like something totally different.
05:08 And you see, she doesn't fold it.
05:09 When I do it, I always mess it up in the ends.
05:11 But she does it perfect every time.
05:14 I don't know how you did that so fast.
05:15 So fast.
05:17 It's more challenging to do this
05:18 than it is to do another pasta.
05:20 'Cause if you do make a mistake,
05:21 you can't reuse the pasta.
05:22 There's a couple of tools we use in making pasta every day.
05:25 One is the expandable cutter, which comes in super handy.
05:28 One side is fluted, the other side is straight.
05:30 And then we also use a ruler.
05:32 That's the way we make the consistency
05:33 and everything the same.
05:34 We measure everything before we cut it.
05:36 You can't just guess on this kind of stuff.
05:38 That's how we keep it looking the same every time.
05:40 - So this is filled with a buffalo milk ricotta
05:43 that we import from Italy.
05:46 So we intentionally flip this dough over
05:49 and we fill it on sort of the backside
05:52 so that when we create the shape,
05:54 the black design is on the exterior.
05:56 This is basically we're forming the caramele shape.
05:59 Caramele means candies in Italian.
06:02 The shape basically resembles a little candy wrapper.
06:06 So at this point, we put them in the freezer.
06:08 We intentionally freeze this pasta
06:10 when it cooks in the boiling water
06:12 and the exterior cooks at like a perfect rate
06:15 and the interior is like runny in that overcook essentially.
06:19 - Caramele!
06:20 It's a cool looking dish.
06:21 I think that's why it's kind of been
06:23 such a popular dish since we opened.
06:24 - And then the pasta itself is served
06:26 in a brown butter sauce with honey pickled persimmons,
06:29 a little bit of black sesame oil.
06:32 And then the dish gets finished
06:33 with some black sesame puree and some opal basil.
06:37 - So this is like one of the last big projects
06:40 we do every day before service.
06:42 We actually make this for the following day.
06:45 The dough is very simple.
06:46 It's just flour, salt, olive oil, and water.
06:49 It's a process where we make all the dough
06:51 and then we portion all the dough, roll it,
06:54 and then we flatten it out
06:56 and then we actually stretch the dough,
06:57 like almost like pizza.
06:59 We take a little 10-inch pizza pan
07:02 and we actually stretch the dough on top of the pan.
07:06 When you stretch it, it looks like the top of a drum.
07:08 Oh, how many are you doing today, 50?
07:10 Okay, 45.
07:12 So she's gonna do 45 today.
07:14 And then we're gonna fill all of them with cheese
07:16 and the garlic chives,
07:17 and then we're gonna stretch another one on top of it.
07:20 And then it rests until tomorrow.
07:22 It's crazy, right?
07:22 - I feel like with all of our recipes
07:24 and we develop them,
07:25 like you always like come up with efficiencies
07:27 and smarter ways to like achieve the same end result.
07:30 And with this particular one,
07:32 there's like no other way to do this.
07:34 So Ali's gonna lay down an even layer of that.
07:37 This is a sofrito made with Japanese garlic chives,
07:41 garlic, and chilies, and olive oil.
07:44 We usually make it a day in advance to make sure it cools.
07:47 Parmesan, this is actually a top secret cheese blend mix.
07:51 We don't typically share the secret of that one.
07:53 So basically for efficiency's sake,
07:55 the move will be to like top all these at once.
07:58 After that, the next move is to top that bread
08:01 with another layer of the stretch dough.
08:03 We're doing like 50 of these a day,
08:05 which is a lot considering how labor intensive
08:07 this little task is.
08:09 There are a few dishes here
08:11 that are kind of like all hands on deck
08:12 because it's like such a big prep project.
08:14 So the chrysanthemum greens,
08:16 picking of the greens is a big thing
08:18 because we literally are like picking like leaf by leaf.
08:21 - We get over 200 pounds of chrysanthemum in a week.
08:24 We've definitely put a dent in the chrysanthemum
08:27 that's shipped to the East Coast
08:28 'cause it's all grown in California mostly.
08:31 Each leaf has to be iced down.
08:32 We spin it in a salad spinner
08:34 and we have to pick like 30 pounds of it a day.
08:38 We have to make sure we don't pick anything
08:40 that's dead or brown.
08:42 After we let it sit in here for about 20 minutes or so,
08:46 if you can see underneath,
08:47 we raise it up with like this little raise thing.
08:49 This way air can kind of get underneath it too
08:52 and it stays nice and fluffy
08:53 and any liquid and stuff can go to the bottom.
08:56 - This chrysanthemum salad that we have on our menu,
08:58 and we make the dressing every day.
09:00 Once the salad's done,
09:01 it gets the shaving of Parmesan over the whole thing.
09:03 Looks like a heavy snowfall.
09:05 The station sells so much of this salad
09:07 that like the people that work Garmerche
09:08 are just like, "Oh my God."
09:09 You learn this one dish,
09:10 you basically know 90% of the station
09:12 'cause we sell so many of them.
09:14 Your arm gets so fatigued from shaving it
09:16 that I (beep) you not,
09:17 we have three cooks that got a tattoo
09:20 that says Parm Arm on their arm.
09:22 (upbeat music)
09:25 - People always ask us like,
09:27 "Oh, are you sick of lasagna?"
09:28 I love that it's become like this thing
09:32 that people recognize from this particular restaurant.
09:35 - I think it's awesome.
09:36 And I think for the volume we do,
09:38 we make it the best we possibly can.
09:40 - This is the process for rolling the lasagna.
09:43 These sheets have been blanched, cooled down.
09:46 There's three sauces that go into the lasagna.
09:48 It's Italian sausage bolognese.
09:50 The other sauce is bechamel.
09:52 And then the third one is the San Rosano tomato sauce.
09:56 So now it's a scoop of,
09:58 Scott just put a scoop of the Parm on there.
10:00 So then the same move with the mozzarella,
10:03 a quart of mozzarella.
10:04 - Two things we don't skimp on ever,
10:06 tomatoes and Parmesan Reggiano.
10:08 - And how much Reggiano are we going through?
10:10 - I would say two full wheels a week.
10:13 - We just go through like copious amounts
10:14 of all different types of cheeses.
10:16 Parm, mozzarella, strecchino are the big ones.
10:20 This gets another layer on top.
10:22 We just put down a little bit of bechamel on the top.
10:24 That's again gonna just like seal the whole roll up
10:26 when we're done here.
10:28 So this is our Italian sausage bolognese.
10:31 This sauce needs to be made a day in advance and cooled.
10:36 Very important.
10:38 If you try to do this with a warm sauce,
10:41 it'll just like totally fall apart.
10:42 It's a little, a little chunky.
10:44 Next move is just to roll this.
10:45 So after the lasagna has sat in the walk-in
10:47 and kind of chilled and set up for a bit,
10:49 now's the time that we cut it.
10:51 So each of these logs basically yields
10:52 like one and a half orders of lasagna.
10:55 'Cause each dish gets six pinwheels.
10:57 - This is only four lasagnas
10:59 and we sell about 60 to 70 a night.
11:02 This is our lasagna dish that we use.
11:04 We spray each one of them.
11:06 We put six ounces of our tomato sauce in each one
11:09 and then we just put in the lasagna.
11:10 It cooks really fast.
11:12 It eats a lot lighter.
11:13 It's really easy to serve to individual people
11:16 and the whole entire top gets crispy.
11:18 When we were growing up, like everybody would always fight
11:20 over the corners of the lasagna, the crispy parts,
11:22 but this, like everybody gets a crispy piece.
11:24 We put a piece of like deli paper on top.
11:26 We stack two on top of each other
11:28 and then we keep them in the walk-in 'til service starts.
11:30 On the weekends, we're open for lunch and dinner.
11:32 We sell over a hundred
11:33 and we only have a 50 seat restaurant.
11:35 So it's pretty intense.
11:37 - So it's 2.20.
11:40 Basically the whole squad's rolling in
11:41 for tonight's dinner service.
11:44 So this is like usually the most hectic part of the day
11:46 'cause we have like crossover between the morning team
11:49 and the PM team.
11:50 - And we just have a lot of people running around
11:51 in very tight quarters, so.
11:53 - Yeah.
11:54 So one of the desserts we've been doing here
11:56 since we opened is our Fior di Latte mochi.
11:59 Basically kind of just like stretching and flattening this.
12:03 We basically like pound out homemade mochi every day
12:07 and we make our own like Fior di Latte gelato.
12:11 We wrap the mochi around it by hand
12:15 and then it's a pretty like simple dish
12:16 but I think it's like pretty complex in flavor
12:19 and pretty interesting.
12:20 I feel like we just like work really well together
12:21 because we kind of like compliment each other's
12:24 like strengths and weaknesses and stuff.
12:26 - But when we first opened,
12:27 in the morning I would open every day
12:29 and then Angie would basically expedite
12:32 almost at five minutes a week.
12:33 - I would close the restaurant.
12:34 I'm like a night owl and he's the morning guy.
12:36 - So it works out good.
12:37 We're lucky because like most restaurants
12:39 only have one leader or one chef in the back of the house
12:41 but we kind of have two.
12:43 So it is 4.05 probably.
12:46 We open at 4.30.
12:47 We have already a line started.
12:49 Have you been to the restaurant before?
12:50 - Yeah, a few times.
12:51 - You have?
12:52 - Yeah, I live around here.
12:53 Am I getting in today?
12:54 - You're the first person on line.
12:55 Of course you are.
12:56 Well, thank you so much for coming back.
12:57 I appreciate it.
12:58 Hi, how are you guys?
12:59 - Good, how are you?
13:00 - Yeah, we came from Phoenix.
13:01 We saw this on TikTok.
13:03 - I hope it lives up to the excitement.
13:04 - It will.
13:05 - Yeah, thank you.
13:06 Now we're gonna walk over to the private event space
13:08 and we're gonna go see Angie.
13:09 She's making a new Amaro.
13:11 So let's go see how it is.
13:12 The beauty about this private event space
13:15 is that during the day, it's like our menu development.
13:17 Love the Italian tradition of like weird elixirs
13:20 and like after dinner drinks.
13:21 I've been messing around with one with broccoli rabe.
13:23 See what happens.
13:25 So it's like a two part process.
13:27 First part is steeping a bunch of aromatics and liquor.
13:30 And then the other part is mixing it
13:32 with a syrup at the end.
13:34 This has Calabrian chilies, black peppercorn,
13:37 orange zest, lemon leaves.
13:39 It also has some lemon juice, water, and sugar.
13:42 As soon as that's cool, mix this all up
13:44 and then get the final product.
13:46 - It's pretty good.
13:50 It's 4.15, we're gonna go downstairs
13:53 and have the meeting with the cooks.
13:54 - This morning, everything looked really tight
13:55 with walk-in organization and everything.
13:57 Has that been going pretty well
13:58 with the new sort of structure of that?
14:01 - Keep the mise en place really tight.
14:02 Just remember to, you know,
14:04 FIFO everything, organization,
14:05 make sure we're keeping everything really neat.
14:07 - Cooking, cleaning, breaking down,
14:09 whatever you guys do, make yourself proud.
14:11 And I believe whatever you guys are doing
14:13 is making yourselves proud right now.
14:15 I would love to be part of this team
14:16 of like flying cooks and cooking beside you guys.
14:19 - Let's have a great service, guys.
14:21 Part of the daily mise en place for the cooks
14:24 is also their hydration.
14:25 So we got electrolytes, your roommate.
14:27 - Please sponsor us.
14:29 - I told Lauren she needs to buy stock in this company
14:32 'cause she drinks like four of these every day.
14:33 So they gotta stay hydrated, it's hot down here.
14:36 This is the pasta station here.
14:38 We have this nifty container here.
14:40 It insulates our pasta so that it stays really cold,
14:43 really fresh.
14:44 You know, this is our bread and butter here,
14:46 but we have our lasagnas coming off of the plancha
14:50 or the flat top.
14:51 - During service, the cooks know exactly what to expect.
14:54 There's a very big push in the beginning.
14:56 It's just getting a lot of food out very fast.
14:59 - Order in, steak mid-well.
15:01 - Pick up three lasagna.
15:02 - I just wanna have a restaurant
15:05 that people wanna come back to.
15:08 We want our food to be like,
15:09 kinda interesting and unique and surprising,
15:12 but we don't want people to have to think too hard about it.
15:15 - Crudo master, he makes some sick crudo.
15:18 - Coming up, corner up.
15:23 - Pick up lasagna solo.
15:25 - For 201, the salad?
15:26 - Yes.
15:27 - It's my parmarm.
15:28 I put in many hours to get this.
15:31 Stamp of approval.
15:32 (laughs)
15:33 - Just do the cauliflower trivet
15:34 and then the regular-ass lasagna.
15:37 - And then we have one caramel.
15:38 - Yeah, that's everything right there.
15:40 Our food is hopefully soulful and comforting.
15:44 You guys have a lobster on order, right?
15:47 Even though the restaurant's super full right now,
15:48 super busy, the team has everything under control.
15:52 It's like a nice float.
15:54 - Pick up flap, that's three.
15:56 - We're very lucky.
15:58 Like, we've been open six years
15:59 and there's still, almost every day,
16:01 a line of people waiting to get in.
16:03 People wanna come here
16:04 and that really makes me excited every day.
16:06 (upbeat music)
16:09 (upbeat music)