This Viral Lasagna Is One of New York’s Most Coveted Dishes. Here’s How It’s Made.
Diners from all over the world wait in line for a taste of Don Angie’s lasagna. And it makes sense, once you learn how much work goes into the New York restaurant’s pasta pinwheels.
In a recent video for Eater’s “Mise en Place” series, the husband-and-wife duo Scott Tacinelli and Angie Rito shared a look behind the scenes of the TikTok-famous Italian spot. And while the video-worthy lasagna is sold more than 100 times a day on the weekends, it nearly remained a secret family recipe.
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“We almost didn’t put the lasagna on the menu, and now it’s the thing everybody comes to the restaurant for,” Tacinelli told Eater.
The main dish begins with almost 100 sheets of lasagna made every day. After each sheet of pasta is boiled and blanched individually in salted ice water—a process that takes about two hours—it’s layered with a whole lot of cheese, béchamel sauce, and Italian sausage Bolognese. Once the stacks are rolled up into logs, the pinwheels are cut and placed in a dish lined with San Marzano tomato sauce. The whole plate cooks relatively quickly once it’s put into the oven, and each pinwheel gets a crispy top from being baked.
“When we were growing up, everybody would fight over the corners of the lasagna,” Tacinelli said. “But this, everybody gets a crispy piece.”
While you could go to Don Angie and just get the lasagna, the restaurant has a number of over-the-top dishes to pair with your pasta. The chrysanthemum salad, which requires about 200 pounds of greens a week, is accessorized with a heaping serving of Parmesan that looks like a “heavy snowfall,” according to Tacinelli. In fact, three of the chefs in the kitchen have a tattoo that says “Parm Arm” to honor the work they do for all that shaved cheese.
And the most expensive dish on the menu is a stuffed lobster for two: A two-pound crustacean is blanched to loosen the meat, which is then chopped up and mixed with a smoked vodka sauce. “We often joke that this is like a cheese restaurant,” Rito said. “The amount of dairy we go through in this restaurant is wild.” (That includes two full wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano every week.)
The TikTok and Instagram videos from Don Angie may have made the restaurant über-famous in the six years it’s been open, but that’s not why Tacinelli and Rito do what they do.
“We want our food to be kind of interesting and unique and surprising, but we don’t want people to have to think too hard about it,” Rito said. It’s comfort food at its most extravagant.
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