These pasta chefs tell stories of tradition, technique and creativity with every fresh dish they serve.
Few dishes capture the essence of comfort quite like pasta. For many, it’s a dish tied to core memories, where a familiar bite can take you back to a specific moment. While pasta is rooted in history and tradition, it inspires innovation and evolution. Chefs constantly reimagine this staple dish, elevating recipes with fresh flavours, new techniques and modern flair. The result? Plates that honour tradition while offering something entirely new, but equally memorable.
What makes Ottawa’s pasta scene compelling is the journey behind the dish. The city’s most passionate makers don’t just cook pasta — they study it. They travel abroad, learn from experts and bring those lessons home, weaving global traditions and techniques into their kitchens.
After speaking to some of the city’s most masterful pasta makers, they all echoed the sentiment that pasta is incredibly simple at its core, but that excellent pasta has a multitude of complexities. Even subtle choices, like how the noodles are hung to dry, can transform the final dish.
Co-owned by sisters Marlo and Coco De Leo, top left, Dreamland Pasta Cafe & Bar’s fresh pastas draw from their nonna’s recipes, Italian travels and playful rule-breaking— honouring tradition while reimagining classics with seasonal, whole ingredients.
Pasta inspired by nonna with a twist
Dreamland Pasta Cafe & Bar is co-owned by sisters Marlo and Coco De Leo. Marlo focuses on the front-of-house and guest experience, while Coco is the head chef. Their menu is full of fresh pasta dishes, inspired by everything from family recipes from their nonna to travel and even Instagram.
“We like to keep things interesting. There are so many delicious ingredients that make up each dish, and we are continuously trying to improve or tweak elements [that] make more sense seasonally or to make it more exciting. We respect using real, whole ingredients, and that’s why some classics stay classic for a reason,” Marlo says. “We like to dip our toes in both worlds, to honour tradition while simultaneously being rule-breakers.”
Take the Rosey and Spicy. This dish is inspired by the classic spicy vodka rigatoni, but Coco has layered in elements such as brown butter and other small, intentional touches that give it a deeper, richer flavour. It is familiar, but it surprises people, which is exactly what she aims for: Taking a beloved classic and making it distinctly Dreamland. Another plus is that many of her dishes are vegan-friendly. A rarity when it comes to many pasta classics.
The sisters’ biggest influence when it comes to pasta-making? Their elders. Marlo says they grew up surrounded by so much incredible cooking that they wanted to bring people the simple and delicious food they enjoyed. This is also where they learned most of their authentic tricks and techniques. They felt as though they levelled up their pasta-making when they travelled to Italy, particularly to towns such as Calabria, to learn and explore.
“I think that’s where we have to truly take in the beauty of using the best of the best, simple ingredients, to make a dish shine,” Marlo says.
Their website says that their restaurant is “the easy answer to the looming question: ‘What do you want to eat tonight?’” Based on how they describe their dishes and how seriously they take their craft, I think most people would agree.
“You’re only as good as your last dish,” Marlo says. “We want every dish we put out to be something we can be proud to be remembered by.”
Dreamland Pasta Cafe & Bar
262 Preston St., Ottawa
dreamlandcafe.ca | @thedreamlandcafe
Chef and co-owner Karim Teyib, bottom right, brings the traditions of western Tuscany to Dante Cucina Italiana, shaping pasta with the precision he learned from family, travel and Michelin starred kitchens, where simplicity and quality ingredients lead every dish.
Pasta from the hills of Tuscany
Karim Teyib, co-owner and chef at Dante Cucina Italiana, grew up in western Tuscany and has been perfecting his pasta-making since childhood. He traces his passion for food to his father, who first taught him to make ravioli. Beyond technique, his father emphasized the value of good ingredients. “Every day my dad would bring home a different regional specialty,” Teyib says. “I think my passion for quality food comes from him”.
Teyib says he likes to hold true to authentic Italian ways of preparing a dish, but his time living in places such as London, England, and then moving from Europe to North America has made him more open to experimentation. In perfecting his craft, Teyib has learned a great deal not only from his family and travel, but also from working in Michelin-starred restaurants.
“I worked in restaurants that made their own pasta, but were approaching the dish from their Michelin-star standard of precision and innovation,” Teyib says. “There are hundreds of different pastas to learn and even more if you count the different variations of fillings and sizes. I did seminars with Italian pasta-makers to improve certain shaping techniques and learn how to make the different types of dough for various pastas. Also, travelling around Italy and trying different regional specialties is a great education in and of itself.”
His time working in Michelin-starred restaurants raised his standards. Now, he focuses on plating and food quality, emphasizing colour, shape and symmetry in every dish he serves. An example of his experiences coming together is the Lasagna Alla Bolognese he makes from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. The dish has delicate pasta, complex yet balanced flavours, minimal mozzarella and the nutty flavour of Parmigiano. This dish highlights the refined, delicate flavours of fresh ingredi-ents and careful preparation, which, according to Teyib, are the hallmarks of traditional Italian cuisine.
The lessons he’s gathered over time have shaped a simple, but long-lasting philosophy.
“At its core, pasta is about the simplicity of ingredients and I consider our ravioli a signature dish of this. I have taught everybody how to make it the way my father taught me,” Teyib says. “Pasta-making is a humble craft, but it transforms simple ingredients into an endless array of delicious dishes.”
Dante Cucina Italiana
7 Springfield Rd., Ottawa
danterestaurant.ca | @dante_restaurantottawa
At North & Navy and Cantina Gia, chef Adam Vettorel, top left, and partner Chris Schlesak explore northern and southern Italian flavours alike, crafting pasta daily with careful attention to technique, seasonality and the realities of Ottawa’s changing climate.
Pasta crafted with attention to detail
Chef Adam Vettorel and business partner Chris Schlesak opened North & Navy (NoNa) in 2015, focusing on the flavours and experiences of Italy’s northern and seaside regions. It has quickly become a staple in the Ottawa pasta scene. In 2020, the pair felt they could broaden the Italian experience to the south’s bold and warm flavours and textures, and Cantina Gia was born. Both locations excel in the pasta craft.
“Growing up with Italian relatives, pasta has always been a food I’ve been interested in cooking. When I first got serious about being a chef, I avoided it because I thought pasta was too common to be impressive. As I got older, I started to appreciate the flavours and techniques my nonna, aunt and mother were cooking,” Vettorel says.
NoNa offers Agnolotti del Plin, a quintessentially northern Italian dish. The technique for making this Piedmontese classic involves a little pinch, “plin” in Italian, to seal the tiny stuffed pasta, so that is how it gets its name. This pasta is common throughout Piedmont but hard to find outside the region. At Gia, they always have spaghetti and meatballs on the menu. This is not a common southern Italian pasta, but Vettorel says southern Italian immigrants who came to North America made it common, as newcomers from Italy were shocked by how affordable and readily available meat was here.
Vettorel says at Gia and NoNa, making pasta daily is a constant challenge, especially in Ottawa, where temperatures swing from +30 C in the summer to –30 C in the winter. Pasta dough is highly sensitive to changes in temperature, humidity and even the eggs or fillings used, meaning the recipe in December can differ significantly from the one in August. Because of this, the pasta station is typically reserved for senior cooks, who draw on hours of shared experience to adapt to those variables and ensure consistency.
Vettorel says he grew the most as a chef when working for John Taylor at Domus Café.
“Many chefs get a dish in their mind and then try to source the ingredients to make it. John started by building relationships with farmers/suppliers and asking them to send their best. We came up with the menu once we had the good stuff in the kitchen,” Vettorel says. “For many traditional pasta dishes, this is exactly how the locals approach making them. No one in Friuli Venezia thinks about Gnocchi di Zucca until pumpkins fill the farmers’ market in the fall.”
“Pasta is the best vehicle to push boundaries because it has a comforting association in most people’s minds,” Vettorel says. “If you are going to try a new flavour combination, a good bowl of pasta is probably the best vehicle for that. If we are confident the flavours are good, we think pasta is the best way to get the public to give them a chance.”
Cantina Gia
749 Bank St., Ottawa
cantinagia.com | @cantinagia
North & Navy
226 Nepean St., Ottawa
northandnavy.com | @northandnavy
Co-owner and head chef Steven Wall, top right, channels lessons from staging in New York City’s Italian kitchens into Supply and Demand’s pastas, combining meticulous technique with global experience to create dishes that feel both thoughtful and effortless.
Pasta rituals from the kitchens of NYC and beyond
Before Steven Wall became co-owner and head chef at Supply and Demand, he spent countless hours preparing for the role. Before settling in Ottawa, Wall considered moving to New York City for his culinary career. At that time, he was staging in kitchens, taking in everything he could learn. When his friend Marc Doiron from Ottawa asked him to be the opening chef at his restaurant Town on Elgin (an Italian-inspired restaurant), he pivoted to staging at the best NYC Italian restaurants to learn pasta-making up close.
“I would go down after work and drive through the night, work for free for a couple of days, drive back through the night and get back to work after the weekend,” Wall says. “I staged for Missy Robins’ A Voce in Columbus Circle and later at Misi. I also spent time in other places, like Esca. It was interesting to go away and watch people make pasta every single day. Shaping it, holding it uncooked, then cooking it to order. They’d finish it 50 to 75 per cent of the way in a pasta cooker on the line and then marry it with the sauce to finish properly. Seeing it done like that, from small to large scale, was eye-opening.”
From these experiences, Wall could cherry-pick the techniques he liked most and apply them to his craft in Ottawa. Now, he will send his own chefs out to stage in places outside of Ottawa (covering the expenses, of course), to bring new ideas to the kitchen.
“[Ian Dancause, my chef de cuisine] always comes back with things he picked up. He might say, ‘I saw they’re holding filled pasta this way, and it rests better. The filling doesn’t absorb as much and the outsides don’t get as crunchy.’ We’d take little lessons like that and slowly build our knowledge over time,” Wall says.
Some stand-out pastas on Supply and Demands’s menu include the squid ink rigatoni with tuna and prosciutto meatballs and the corn agnolotti. The squid ink rigatoni carries echoes of Wall’s time staging at Esca, where he first experienced tuna with prosciutto in a Bolognese. He reimagines that idea into tuna-prosciutto meatballs with breadcrumbs made from his grandmother’s Newfoundland milk buns, then braised for hours in a slow-cooked tomato sauce. The agnolotti is also a labour of love, requiring the shucking of 60 cobs of corn a day, then cooking them down with onions, garlic, butter and olive oil until they reduce and concentrate into a sweet purée. He mixes it with mascarpone and Parmesan, then pipes it into delicate little agnolotti. Preparing these dishes often proves to be an all-day task, and even this description simplifies the actual effort involved in the final dish.
For Wall, though, it’s not about the long process that goes into the dish; it’s the experience of enjoying it.
“I just want you to come in, see the menu, order it, eat it, and [the experience] not have to feel that deep,” Wall says. “Pasta is just that simple and that hard at the same time.”
Supply and Demand
1335 Wellington St., Ottawa
supplyanddemandfoods.ca | @supply_ottawa
