Roll out: Enjoy handmade pasta from these Tahoe eateries
Transport yourself from Lake Tahoe to Lake Como with a hearty portion of handmade pasta from one of the basin’s beloved Italian restaurants. Enjoy tagliatelle heaped with a classic beef and veal bolognese in Truckee or campanelle in a vibrant basil pesto in South Lake Tahoe. Made with high-quality f lour and experienced hands, you won’t want the boxed stuff ever again.
Primo’s Italian Bistro\South Lake Tahoe
Tucked in the back of a strip mall in South Lake Tahoe, Primo’s Italian Bistro has been serving up from-scratch Italian fare to loyal locals and visitors alike since 2012.
“My family has had restaurants back east for as long as I can remember,” explains owner Jim Primo. “My family is originally from Sicily, but I call the food we make at Primo’s ‘East Coast Italian’ because the kitchens I grew up in had guys from all over Italy, and I learned from them.”
When it came to pasta, Primo wanted to channel his grandma’s handmade dough.
“It’s all about the texture,” says Primo. “It’s lighter than a lot of the dried egg noodles.”
At Primo’s, tuck into handmade bucatini carbonara coated in a silky egg-cheese sauce dotted with pancetta or fettuccine swimming in an equally velvety garlic cream sauce. Fresh radiatore — said to resemble tiny radiators — soaks up housemade arugula pesto and tomatoes, while vodka sauce with mushrooms and sausage mingles with tubular rigatoni. Even the lasagna is made with fresh sheets of pasta layered with beef, ricotta and mozzarella.
This summer Primo is opening a second location in the former Lake House Restaurant location on Emerald Bay Road. Still a family-friendly destination with all of the original from-scratch favorites, there will be more classic Italian steakhouse entrees on the menu, too.
Gastromaniac/South Lake Tahoe
Growing up near Lake Como, a sprawling lake in Italy nestled against the foothills of the Alps, Nicola Ambra remembers rolling out fresh pasta with his grandma when he was just five years old. The idea of being a chef stuck with him from an early age.
More than two decades ago, a climbing trip to Yosemite turned into a transatlantic move from Italy to San Francisco for Ambra, and eight years ago, a relocation to South Lake Tahoe. After years of working in restaurants and hotels, Ambra and his wife, Terri Wong, realized their dream and opened their own restaurant, Gastromaniac Homemade Pasta and Pizza, in 2019.
“For the pasta and all the ingredients, I try to get as much from Italy as I can, but the produce I source it more locally,” explains Ambra. “The pasta is very simple — semolina flour and water. It’s vegan. We don’t add in any preservatives or anything else. It’s fresh pretty much daily.”
Gastromaniac offers around seven different shapes of pasta — rigatoni, corkscrew fusilli, snail-like lumache, bellflower-shaped campanelle, spaghetti, potato gnocchi and the wavy edged ribbon noodle, mafaldine.
At the casual eatery, diners order at the counter, selecting their pasta shape and sauce — simple recipes that rely on the quality of ingredients and skill of execution. A classic tomato basil, grandma’s meat bolognese, vibrant basil pesto and a creamy three-cheese sauce made with formaggio straight from Italy are mixed with the freshly made pasta and brought to your table (and best enjoyed with one of the 60-plus bottles of Italian wine available on the menu).
“Some shapes grab more of the sauce. The classic rigatoni works well with smooth sauce because the sauce can travel through the tube of the pasta,” says Ambra. “After that I really have discovered that it becomes a personal thing — maybe the shape of pasta reminds you of something you ate when you were a kid. We have the bellflower campanelle, and people love it because it’s something different and looks cool.”
Gastromaniac also offers its fresh pasta and sauces to take and make at home.
“We try to stay as authentic Italian as we can,” notes Ambra. “We want it to be casual for any walk of life to enjoy.”
Sapori Italian Kitchen/Stateline
Italian fine dining and sweeping views of Lake Tahoe collide at Sapori Italian Kitchen on the 18th floor of Harrah’s Lake Tahoe. Opened in 2022, the restaurant features treasured recipes from the Carano family, owners of Caesars Entertainment, and other signature dishes by Chef Ivano Centemeri, longtime chef of La Strada at Eldorado Resort Casino down in Reno.
“The Carano family has always been very passionate about their Italian heritage, and fresh pasta is a very strong component of Italian food,” says Centemeri. “You need good oil. Good garlic. Good flour that has that nice gluten and protein that gives you the flavor of the pasta. Good eggs. Good cheese. When you have 3-4 ingredients in a dish, you better have good ingredients to make it successful. That’s our philosophy.”
Foremost on the menu is the Carano family’s “world famous” mushroom ravioli stuffed with porcini mushrooms and topped with roasted mushrooms, fresh thyme, cream and parmigiano. Fresh lobster and crab tortelloni are drenched in Gastromaniac a vermouth truffle cream sauce and joined by a butter-poached lobster tail and pea shoots.
And when it came to lasagna, traditional wouldn’t do it for Centemeri.
“I was tired of the normal layered lasagnas,” says Centemeri, who chose instead to roll up the fresh sheets of pasta with fillings into rosettes. “When they are rolled, it gives more attention to the pasta and not just to the cheese, bechamel and meat sauce. In each bite, you can taste everything.”
With a dozen fresh pasta dishes to choose from, there’s something for every palate. (Pro tip: don’t miss out on the housemade focaccia stuffed with cheese, prosciutto and fig marmalade.)
Pianeta Cucina Italiana/Truckee
For 25 years, Chef Bill Arnoff has been cooking up fresh pasta at Pianeta Cucina Italiana in downtown Truckee.
“There’s nothing like fresh pasta. It’s a night and day comparison to dried pasta,” says Arnoff. “Fresh pasta tends to absorb more of the sauce that it’s tossed with unlike a dried pasta where the sauce tends to slide off.”
Using finely ground Italian flour, eggs and water, Arnoff rolls out fresh angel hair, tagliatelle and ravioli daily for classic and creative dishes. Enjoy fresh tagliatelle with veal meatballs and pesto or dressed in a savory marinara with housemade spicy fennel and mild Tuscan-style sausage. Goat cheese ravioli complements lamb chops, mint-pistachio pesto and seasonal vegetables, while fresh angel hair pasta mixes with white wine, capers, garlic, tomatoes and grilled prawns.
For Arnoff, Italian cuisine is all about creating dishes that are “fresh, intense and well-balanced.”
“This is a scratch kitchen. We make everything that we possibly can in house,” explains Arnoff. “I even make my own sausages here. I can tell you that there are no preservatives in them — just salt and spices.”
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Summer 2024 edition of Tahoe Magazine.
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