Funke: Flamboyant Americana meets Italian craftsmanship

There's something about the give and chew of handmade pasta. It's like the difference between a sweater knitted by your grandmother - pleasingly knobbly, tiny variations in the thickness and tautness of the loops - and a synthetic scrap from Kmart. They both keep your torso warm, but you can guarantee one of them's ending up in the Vinnie's bin before the end of the season.

When you scan the menu at Funke, chef and Netflix Chef's Table star Evan Funke's temple to fresh-made pasta in Beverly Hills, and siblings to his other two hits Felix in Venice and Hollywood's Mother Wolf, it's hard to decide which of his rich, egg noodles will best highlight his a mano pasta-making skills. My first instinct was to go for the Ligurian-style trofie, those wiggly little tapered corkscrews traditionally served with pesto. In the show, Funke memorably describes the act of making them – a precise, diagonal roll along the palm, a quick flick at the end – as "elegant but violent, like a trapped cyclone". My urge to eat a trapped cyclone is not inconsiderable. 

I was also very drawn to the tagliatelle al ragu, because I longed to discover whether Funke's ragu recipe truly had the 'big bass tone of umami' that he explains on the show, something he achieves by bolstering the often lacklustre American beef with bone marrow and pork fat.