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Pastaio: Home
We don't take reservations and so when the restaurant is full we use a virtual queue system.
So come by, leave us your details and if we don't have a table available, go for a drink (we like Blue Posts on Kingly Street or Bar Termini & Bar Swift in Soho if you have more time) and we’ll text you as soon as your table is ready.
Please note, during the evening we can only seat tables in full or allocate a group to the queue when all guests are present.
Pastaio, London: Restaurant Review - olive magazine
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Read our expert review of Pastaio, a buzzy new Soho restaurant that’s all about handmade pasta.
The latest addition to the pasta gang – and the newest outpost of ex-River Café chef Stevie Parle’s burgeoning restaurant empire, which also includes Rotorino, Palatino, Sardine, Dock Kitchen and Craft London – can be found in Soho.
Pastaio (meaning someone who makes pasta by hand) follows in the Italian-centric footsteps of Palatino and Rotorino but focusses chiefly on pasta, made fresh every day in the restaurant, a cavernous Tom Dixon-designed space on Ganton Street that’s all high ceilings and exposed fittings, with a huge, colourful mural (by Rob Lowe of Supermundane) that saves the room from feeling coldly industrial.
It’s also affordably priced; you can order a pasta dish for as little as £6 (rigatoni with slow-cooked tomato sauce) and no main exceeds £11.
From the pasta section, malloreddus (tiny, ridged Sardinian gnocchi) came dressed with a slow-cooked sausage sauce that was elegantly light and flavourful, while agnoli stuffed with grouse, pork and rabbit was a deceptively simple dish that made good use of prime autumn produce.
Pastaio | A Handmade Pasta Restaurant from Chef Stevie Parle ...
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Pastaio.
Slap bang in the heart of Soho, this first properly central spot is a more laid-back (and, ergo, affordable) affair than his other restaurants, with long communal terrazzo tables and contemporary interiors, rather than a chintzy replica of an Italian trattoria.
Here, he’s serving up the kind of steaming plates of freshly-made pasta that he’s perfected at Palatino and Rotorino, only with a British seasonal twist, including caserecce (a kind of ‘free form’ pasta) with pesto, green beans and potato; gravy ravioli; grouse, rabbit and pork agnoli and a whole lot more of that cacio e pepe spaghetti.
And if you’re not a pasta fan, there’ll be plenty of Italian inspired smaller plates, like anchovy-stuffed pepperoncini, Castelfranco and pomegranate salad, and a fried mozzarella sandwich.
Pastaio | 19 Ganton Street, W1F 7BU Like handmade pasta spots?
Pastaio, Soho: restaurant review | Foodism
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Top right, clockwise: Fried mozzarella, nduja & honey sandwich; cured meats and sweet pickles; heritage tomatoes and basil; heritage tomatoes and basil; clams cooked in butter and grillo; castelfranco, pomegranate and pecorino salad; Buffalo mozzarella, olive oil, chilli and oregano; and red pepper stuffed with tomato & anchovy Stevie Parle is a man on a mission.
Aperitivo cocktails (negroni, americano, rosato and an eponymous drink made with passion fruit, sloe gin and Aperol) make up the mixed-drinks offering, while five reds and five whites (all Italian) are labeled by their flavour notes, with three available by the glass.
Come hungry, because pasta here – with its mouthwatering firmness between the teeth and straightforward but lively sauces – is moreish, and inexpensive.
A rigatoni with slow-cooked tomatoes, marjoram and a dusting of pecorino, is a snip at £6, while the grouse, rabbit and pork agnoli lives and dies by, simply, the texture of the pasta and the punch of the herbed meat within it.
Throughout Pastaio's menu, simplicity is a strong suit – rich, pungent roasted red peppers are served with a fillet of anchovy and semi-dried tomato, purple chicory is enlivened by sweet bursts of pomegranate seeds and more of that nutty pecorino, and the killer main is just as it sounds: ravioli filled with potato, with gravy and egg yolk, a simple dish whose constituent parts all elevate the whole.
Pastaio, restaurant review: London's newest Italian is 'a childish ...
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It's 6pm on a Saturday and I am in a restaurant eating pasta with cheese sauce for dinner.
We're in Pastaio, the newish restaurant from Stevie Parle, the latest proprietor to look at the two-hour queue for pasta with cheese sauce at Padella, in Borough Market, and think 'I'll have a bit of that'.
The short list of pastas, worked through on three separate visits, all earn their place, but particularly the cacio e pepe and the agnoli, which are silky little meat grenades, like unfurling dim-sum, brimful of pork and game.
Cacio e pepe, as anyone who's attempted it at home in recent years will attest is much easier to get wrong than right, which is why many Italian restaurants don't bother.
The tomato sauce pasta, only £6.50, would be plenty for lunch.
Pastaio, London: Restaurant Review - olive magazine
food value
Read our expert review of Pastaio, a buzzy new Soho restaurant that’s all about handmade pasta.
The latest addition to the pasta gang – and the newest outpost of ex-River Café chef Stevie Parle’s burgeoning restaurant empire, which also includes Rotorino, Palatino, Sardine, Dock Kitchen and Craft London – can be found in Soho.
Pastaio (meaning someone who makes pasta by hand) follows in the Italian-centric footsteps of Palatino and Rotorino but focusses chiefly on pasta, made fresh every day in the restaurant, a cavernous Tom Dixon-designed space on Ganton Street that’s all high ceilings and exposed fittings, with a huge, colourful mural (by Rob Lowe of Supermundane) that saves the room from feeling coldly industrial.
It’s also affordably priced; you can order a pasta dish for as little as £6 (rigatoni with slow-cooked tomato sauce) and no main exceeds £11.
From the pasta section, malloreddus (tiny, ridged Sardinian gnocchi) came dressed with a slow-cooked sausage sauce that was elegantly light and flavourful, while agnoli stuffed with grouse, pork and rabbit was a deceptively simple dish that made good use of prime autumn produce.
Pastaio: Stevie Parle shows off his pasta prowess | London Evening ...
food
Stevie Parle has been on a constant roll since opening Dock Kitchen in Ladbroke Grove back in 2009, with his restaurant empire expanding at pace.
Now under his belt are Dalston Italian Rotorino, British restaurant Craft in the shadow of The O2, southern French restaurant Sardine in Islington and Rome-inspired Palatino in Clerkenwell.
There is plenty more rolling going on at restaurant number six, which specialises in fresh pasta that is proudly made in an open kitchen on-site, almost constantly.
A stand-out is grouse, rabbit and pork agnoli — a gutsy stuffed pasta filled with rich shredded meat and lavished in sage butter, while a more delicate fusilli with crab, courgette, tomato and marjoram is about as light as pasta gets.
See more of the Best Italian Restaurants and Best Restaurants in Soho
Pastaio, London W1: 'I never thought I'd see the day where I enjoyed ...
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The seating is communal, the decor bright and vaguely industrial (Parle has said he wanted a “canteeny feel”) and the food simple: eight antipasti and seven pasta dishes, with nothing above £11.
Dogs seek me out) and a prosecco slushy machine churns quietly on the bar, serving up pure joy with a stripy straw.
We’ve made an executive decision to stick to the classics: rigatoni with slow-cooked tomato sauce and parmesan; casarecce with pesto; the much-photographed bucatini cacio e pepe; and a bonus helping of malloreddus (“little calves” in Sardinian dialect, apparently, although they look to me more like caterpillars) with sausage ragù.
Having made a serious study of cacio e pepe on a recent holiday, Pastaio’s looks way too wet, but once we’ve established that neither of us is too proud to use our fingers, it’s difficult to regret the amount of sharply cheesy, boldly peppery sauce left on the plate after we’ve hoovered up the last bouncy noodle.
But for a simple, satisfying plate of pasta in a congenial environment just yards from Europe’s busiest shopping street (and priced at 75p less than the mac’n’cheese at the chain pub around the corner), I reckon it’s pretty near perfect.