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The creator of Pasta Club shows us how she entertains at home with tequila, disco music, fresh ingredients and her incredible mix and matched collection of glassware and crockery.
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Home essentials
- Q.Who taught you to cook?
“My mum. She's a Persian food queen. In Toowoomba, we grew our own veggies, and my mum would literally take a bowl and a pair of scissors out to the backyard and cut off the lettuce and the cucumber and all the herbs and we'd eat it straight away. I’ve always eaten the best lettuce because I ate it five minutes after it had been cut. Food loses its flavour after you’ve picked it. Eating it fresh is a taste sensation. My mum also taught me about flavours. Like, balsamic with Parmesan and onion, you know what I mean? She taught me about salt, acid, heat, all that kind of stuff.”
- Q.What food principles do you follow?
“I’m not vegetarian, but Pasta Club is. Partly because a large portion of the population is vegetarian, and if we did meat, then we'd always have to do two menus. The other reason why we're vegetarian is because we base the principle quite loosely on the Blue Zones, which are five areas in the world where people live to 120, and two of those areas are Greece and Italy. In these zones they eat seasonally, they have community, they drink wine, they don’t believe in retirement, there are a lot of elements to it but it’s part of the Epicurean lifestyle we make part of Pasta Club. I went to Italy and Greece when I was 18, 19, that was the next phase of my food education.”
- Q.Go-to drink order?
“I drink tequila, but I actually don't like lime. I know it's weird, but it's normally tequila, Cointreau, lots of lemon, and then a little bit of mint. Sometimes I'll make a Strawberry Lemon Margarita, which is just muddled strawberry, lemon juice, mint, tequila, and cointreau shaken up. Casamigos Blanco Tequila is my pick. George Clooney. I love him.”
- Q.What do you always have on hand to drink at home?
“98 percent of the population likes wine, so I always have wine at my house. Always red – I’ve not been able to drink white since my 20s. Too many bad savvy bs. Tequila, obviously, and a whole lot of lemons. I’m a psycho for lemons. And I’ll always have sparkling water. With just that, you can always make something.”
- Q.How do you choose wine?
“I’m not a good judge of wine so I have someone else pick it for Pasta Club. We stick to local natural wines. In the early days of Pasta Club, I’d just go to Dan Murphy’s and get bottles of Tar & Roses, which are from Heathcote, Victoria.”
- Q.What makes a great event?
“I think the host, obviously. The music is massive as well. I know the food's a part of it, but to be honest, I feel like the vibe is so key. So if people walk in and feel that the energy is lifted, it will be a good time. When you walk into our events, the disco music's really loud, the candles are lit, and the tables are really packed and colourful and chaotic. So I think it's about literally creating a vibe. I want it to be loud. It's actually purposely loud to encourage you to be loud and let go.”
- Q.What’s your tablescaping style?
“So our styling is the opposite of everyone else's. Everything is mismatched. That's a really conscious decision. I get anxious when I see 10 white plates lined up. So everything we have is from an op shop, it's for a purpose. Consciously considered mismatching. I think it encourages people that doing things that don’t match can still be really beautiful. We call it organised chaos. I also like the freedom of having mismatched things. It doesn't matter if something breaks, because it's all replaceable. Everything that's amazing has already been created, and it's in op shops.”
Notable mentions
- Q.Last thing that inspired you to cook?
“I recently watched that Masterclass with Massimo Bottura. He cooked asparagus in stock, and I was like, ‘effing yum!’ So then I made a pasta where I cooked the asparagus in the chicken stock, and then put that in pasta with pecorino, and it was so effing yum. So just a tiny thing to do, but boiling the asparagus in stock meant that the stock went into the asparagus, because asparagus is such a kind of watery, absorbent vegetable. Also he told us to taste our food more as we cook, and I didn’t do that very much. Now I do.”
- Q.All-time favourite event that you’ve hosted?
“It was this amazing Pasta Club in Byron that we did. We had a big budget so we could do more. We had 60 people, we rented this really big, beautiful house. We got all the hired furniture to set it up, we had great staff and great chefs, it was amazing. The real Pasta Club experience is, you come to Pasta Club and then after everyone eats, it's like, a full DJ disco of dancing. We were able to hire my favourite DJ duo, and everyone was in an awesome mood.”
- Q.Best restaurant you’ve ever eaten at?
“Oh, Bianca in Brisbane is pretty unbelievable. Just everything, literally everything, is incredible. The whole menu, the whole drinks menu. Everything is unbelievable.”
Let’s plan... a pasta night
- Q.Who’s coming:
“6 to 8 of my friends, because I don't see them as much as I’d like. I think, because I'm so busy, my friends have just stopped inviting me to things. Love them, bless them, but it’s because I just work all the time. So for me, having them over is just about giving something to them. Showing I love them. Also, because I'm so all over the shop, my friends don't really get me fully, unless we're together, and that's why they're okay with it, that's why they love and accept me, even though I don't answer their calls or their text messages for four months. But if I host dinner I'm fully there, I'm fully in, I'm giving them everything I've got.”
- Q.The guest brief:
“Dress colourful. Come early. Just bring yourself. I know people want to bring stuff, but I feel like it's my gift to do the whole thing for them.”
- Q.Drink on arrival:
“Definitely a Margarita. I’ll do the work and make them in a shaker. If it was any more than 8, I’d do a big batch, but for 8 people I’ll make them individually.”
- Q.The pre-dinner mingle:
“I always start with bruschetta, olives, bread, tomatoes and a cheese like burrata. I tend to have all the entrees out because I stress if there’s too much to do when people are over. So I tend to prep all of the food I can, before anyone arrives.”
- Q.The main event:
“When everyone is sitting down with their entree, then I'll go into the kitchen and whip up the pastas and then just bring them out as I make them. The kind of pasta will be based on what I find fresh, and then I’ll side it with some greens or roast veggies. I like to stick to whatever I’m drinking, so I’ll stay with margs, but other people like wine, so I'll probably have wine on the table just to serve those people. I’ll outsource the dessert. I don't make that. A girl knows what she's good at. I'll get a tiramisu or a tart, or even just sorbet with fresh mint and strawberries.”
- Q.The decor:
“I've got a whole drawer of op shop crockery that we just always use, always old school Italian plates. I literally have this huge thing in the back of my car, it's just full of plates. I always pop in to Salvos and that to find more wherever I am. Like in Toowoomba, in Brisbane, in Melbourne – literally everywhere.”
image credits: Shelley Horan
