It’s a brand new pasta-bility!
Visitors to this weekend’s outdoor food market Smorgasburg can pick up — literally — a brand new portable pasta dish in the shape of a donut. The mad genius behind the fried spaghetti circles said that they combine the flavor of one of Italy’s most famous dishes with the convenience of New York’s favorite glazed treat.
“We wanted to create something you can carry around and it’s not messy — we were thinking of it as pasta on the go,” said Brooklyn Heights resident Luigi Fiorentino, who co-owns Pop Pasta. “It’s almost like slow food meets fast food.”
The spaghetti donuts — which come in several flavors, including traditional red sauce and carbonara — were inspired by the traditional Neapolitan dish spaghetti pie, said Fiorentino. That dish take leftover noodles, coats them with egg and fries them into a pie that can be cut into slices, but Fiorentino chose to mold the noodles into a donut shape because it is a popular food that everyone loves, he said.
Fiorentino hopes that his spaghetti donuts will catch on and become a new staple of the American diet.
“We see these as a new fast food concept,” he said. “We want to have kids love it. It can be at games, a school food — it can just be something else in addition to the slice of pizza, the hot dog, and these items that everybody already knows.”
Pop Pasta is one of 24 new vendors at Smorgasburg this year, selected from about 300 applicants, said Smorgasburg co-founder Eric Demby.
Among the other new vendors putting exciting twists on classic tastes is John’s Juices, whose slogan is “All juice, no cups.” The stand blends fresh juice on the spot, and serves it in a container made of that same fruit.
The business is helmed by Manhattan’s John DeWindt and his fiance August Major, who first saw the creations on a trip to Japan. They bought a special machine that drills a hole in the fruits and grind the insides into juice and brought it back to the States, fashioning drinks out pineapple, oranges, dragonfruit, and tiny watermelons. Drinkers can also spice up their juice selection by adding fresh ginger, agave, or sparkling water.
The colorful fruits are sure to be a social media favorite, said Major, but it is also a great way to sip something from the earth.
“It’s not just about the novelty factor, we also promote having a juice that’s all natural,” she said.
Try a spaghetti donut or juiced fruit at Smorgasburg; Saturdays at East River Park (90 Kent Ave. at N. Eighth Street in Williamsburg), Sundays at Prospect Park’s Breeze Hill (East Drive at Lincoln Road in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, www.smorg
