Brion: That’s Italian? 3 Twin Cities restaurants with fresh takes on pasta.

Gochujang vodka rigatoni. Broccoli mezzaluna. Mafaldine with guajillo meatballs. Maybe it’s something in the water — or maybe it’s the flour — but chefs across the Twin Cities have been putting innovative spins on pasta, sending it twirling in thrilling new directions.

It starts with the pasta itself: fresh dough being rolled, cut and shaped everyday, giving chefs a blank slate they can bend to their will. And while there are indeed many great places to get textbook classic pastas, some chefs aren’t content to play by the old rules.

For me, the pasta section has quietly become the most exciting part of a menu. It’s where chefs increasingly cook what they want to cook, and not just what they’re expected to. They’re leaning into technique, blending cultures, chasing nostalgia, rewriting classics and making dishes that would likely get them drummed straight out of Italy. It’s pasta as personal expression.

Headed by chef/owner Jeff Watson, Minari in northeast Minneapolis is one of the most compelling recent openings from Daniel del Prado’s restaurant group (Watson is also the longtime culinary director for DDP). He’s written a freewheeling menu that combines East Asian flavors and ingredients, including Japanese, Chinese and especially Korean, drawing from his heritage.

At the restaurant, you will find crudos, dumplings and Korean barbecue. And, as common across most if not all del Prado spots, a large part of Minari’s menu is dedicated to pasta, ranging from spicy dan dan noodles (made with mafaldini instead of a wavy Chinese wheat noodle) to a cheesy buldak (where gnocchi takes the place of rice cakes).

“I love traditional food,” says Watson, citing his love for classic Italian pastas. “But it’s fun to take some Italian and French cuisine styles and mix them with Asian ingredients.” So at Minari, you’ll find a gochujang vodka rigatoni, a Korean-Italian mashup. Watson builds layers of flavors by sweating chiles and garlic, then caramelizing gochujang (a Korean chili paste) and doenjang (a fermented soybean paste), deglazing it all with sake, reducing it, and then adding tomato.

An Italian comfort food dish but with an irresistible Korean angle, the rigatoni combines the creamy, tangy, and zesty elements of a vodka sauce, but with the spicy and savory depth that comes from the gochujang. The added umami makes the Italian original feel almost timid by comparison. “It’s familiar,” says Watson, “but new at the same time.”

At the colorful and boisterous restaurant Dario in the North Loop, veteran chef Joe Rolle serves a menu with a broad, internationally inspired bent. Flavors run the gamut from Italian to Eastern European, from French Provençal to Middle Eastern, from Mediterranean to Thai.

“I was very cautious and thoughtful of telling everybody in the beginning, we are not an Italian restaurant,” Rolle said of opening Dario in January 2024. “We’re an Italian-inspired restaurant with global influences.”

Each dish has an elaborate backstory, with Rolle taking inspiration from his travels, restaurants where he has worked, or even his upbringing. Rolle’s food is less about fusion and more about storytelling.

“I love to riff on classic dishes,” Rolle says about his broccoli mezzaluna — a fun reinterpretation of broccoli cheese soup. The classic Midwestern comfort food is transformed into a broccoli and cheese-filled half-moon pasta, served with a white cheddar Italian fonduta, brunoised green apple, tender braised pancetta and a maple syrup gastrique. The crispy fried sage is a nice touch.

There’s also a short rib agnolotti on the menu that’s inspired by American pot roast, but amplified with a very French veal demi-glace.

323 Washington Av. N., Mpls., dariorestaurant.com

At the self-described “modern Italian pasta bar” Liliana in Woodbury, the cooking is far more creative than that label suggests. Executive chef Kenzie Edinger’s boundary-pushing approach reimagines traditional dishes like spaghetti and meatballs or a chicken Parmesan. Her food doesn’t chase authenticity — she’s just after craveability.

“I’m adding a lot more spice than I think is traditional in Italian cuisine,” says Edinger, who plays with heat, texture and shape. So you’ll find smoky guajillo in the meatballs (Edinger credits co-owner Jason Hansen with the idea) and a spaghetti alla chitarra with smoked octopus topped with a Szechuan peppercorn-inflected chili crunch. (Although the dish has since evolved, she credits the chili crunch recipe to sous chef Mary Henrickson.)

Then there’s the chicken Alfredo cappelletti, a recent addition to the late-night menu. Edinger wanted to reimagine the ubiquitous comfort classic while asking the question, “How can we make it as chicken-y as possible?” So she stuffs chicken sausage inside cappelletti, and serves it with two sauces (a chicken demi-glace and a fontina béchamel). It’s all topped with crispy chicken skin crumbles that require a pretty elaborate production process.

To Edinger, pasta is basically a canvas that lets her do anything she wants. “There are so many different shapes that work in so many different ways,” she says. “It just feels endless to me. And it’s fun. Who doesn’t love eating pasta?”

Here are five other notable and creative pasta dishes I’ve had recently:

Mac & Chi at Juche, St. Paul: A clever riff on macaroni and cheese, except here it’s twisty spiraled cavatappi noodles in a spicy, warm and oozy kimchi-infused cheddar cheese sauce topped with scallions and even more cheese (grated mozzarella).

Spaghetti Giapponese at Stargazer, Minneapolis: The Travail team recently acquired and rebooted the beloved south Minneapolis spot i.e. - Italian Eatery, and they just added several new fresh pasta dishes to the menu at their cocktail bar Stargazer, including this ramen-adjacent bowl of springy noodles with karaage and jalapeño in an umami-heavy guanciale dashi broth.

French Onion Agnolotti at Hendrix & Siena, Hopkins: Transforming a traditional French onion soup into a warm, comforting, and brothy pasta dish, caramelized onions and Comté get browned on top of a crouton alongside potato-filled black garlic agnolotti in a rich, intense consommé.

Mentaiko Lumache at Sanjusan, Minneapolis: Essentially an irresistible boxed mac and cheese, this Japanese-Italian fusion pasta dish combines spicy cod roe, butter and tamari to form a creamy sauce that gets neatly captured in shell-shaped pasta tubes and topped with basil, pistachio and toasted nori powder.