Is serving spaghetti and meatballs heresy?

Killjoys may observe that in Italy meatballs are not served with spaghetti. They are cooked in a tomato sauce and while sometimes that sauce is mixed with pasta, the meat is always eaten separately. Such conventions don’t bother Grasso. “We’re not an Italian restaurant, we’re an Italian-American restaurant and those are two separate things,” he says.

And nothing epitomises Italian-American food more than an overloaded plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Walt Disney ensured its iconic status when he served it up to his canine canoodlers in Lady and the Tramp, and no modern mobster drama seems complete without a reference to the dish, from The Sopranos to Boardwalk Empire.

When the end credits roll on Italianamerican, the film director Martin Scorsese’s 1974 documentary about his parents, Catherine and Charles, his mother’s recipe for meatballs is the last thing to scroll across the screen.

Scriptwriters often make a meal of the gastronomic gulf between the reverence with which, say, a New Yorker might regard spaghetti and meatballs, and how it’s judged in the country from whence its constituent parts came. This was never better illustrated than in Big Night, the 1996 comedy co-directed by Stanley Tucci, in which two chefs, newly arrived immigrants from Italy, clash with a New Jersey diner who wants to embellish their delicately crafted scallop and shrimp risotto with a side order of said pasta dish.

Some still regard spaghetti and meatballs as though it were an affront to Italian tradition, Grasso says. “There’s still a snobbery towards this type of food, but I think more and more people are starting to understand that it’s a standalone cuisine.”

To be fair to its critics, Italian-American food was once synonymous with the fare of bad chain restaurants in the UK — I’m still haunted by a BBQ chicken pasta I once ate at the Cheltenham branch of Frankie & Benny’s.

However, the reason the young foodie crowd are so excited about eating it now is that the dishes are brasher and more decadent than anything you are likely to be served in a traditional Italian restaurant. It’s distinct from the food of the “old country”, Grasso says, in that it’s more indulgent, more cheesy (the ingredient, not the sentiment) and deeply comforting.

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To meet this new demand, several new Italian-American-themed restaurants have opened, including The Dover in Mayfair. In his recent review of it, Giles Coren described its spaghetti and meatballs dish as “tight little nuts of grain-fed beef, rumbling in a bright, lively sauce, all tangled up in the pasta … Positively sexual it was”.

Meanwhile, Carbone, a New York institution renowned for its meatballs, is also set to open its doors in Grosvenor Square and, outside the capital, Louis, a “love letter to the Italian-American restaurants of New York” will open in Manchester in autumn.

Not everyone is happy about the trend. “It’s very disappointing, if you ask me,” says the Italian chef Francesco Mazzei. “These dishes have nothing to do with Italy. They’re very rich and stodgy, which is not what Italian cooking is all about.”

“It’s Mickey Mouse Italian food,” says James Chiavarini, owner of Il Portico, an Italian restaurant in Kensington. “That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with it — it just does not resemble Italian food.”

However, he does recognise the allure of a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. “A lot of people are using TikTok like a search engine to find restaurants these days and there’s something very visceral about seeing a big plate of carbs, meat and cheese. It hits you on a primal level.”

They don’t really belong together, he believes, but he does understand the appeal; “it’s basically an Italian hamburger,” he says. “If you look at the components — carbs, beef, sauce — it’s the same.”

Tom Cenci, right, with chef Francisco at Mortimer House Kitchen

At Mortimer House Kitchen in Fitzrovia, the executive chef Tom Cenci didn’t encounter too much resistance when persuading the Italian chefs in his team to make the restaurant’s signature fresh spaghetti with beef and oregano meatballs, which is served with a rich marinara sauce.

However, there was consternation about tackling another Italian-American invention, chicken parm, a mash-up of melanzane parmigiana (a baked aubergine dish with tomato sauce and cheese) and cotoletta (a breaded veal cutlet).

“It’s very hard to get an Italian to cook something different,” Cenci says. “It’s considered breaking the rules. I told them to remember that we’re not in Italy, we’re in London. We’re allowed to stray from tradition and Italian-American cuisine allows you to do that. It’s a little bit more playful and naughty. Sometimes restaurants can take themselves way too seriously.”

Cenci’s version comes with a side of fresh spaghetti and a cured egg yolk and is proving extremely popular. “No one’s taken Italian-American food and done it well in the UK before,” he says. “It used to be looked down upon because it was served at places like TGI Fridays and wasn’t good. Now people are realising it can be refined, tasty and special.”

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While Italians might see changes to their traditional dishes as heresy, Cenci doesn’t have a problem with adapting recipes. “We used to cook our pasta Italian al dente but we got so many customers saying it wasn’t cooked. Now we cook it slightly more English al dente instead of Italian al dente.”

This is a phenomenon that the Italian chef Mitshel Ibrahim recognises too. His east London restaurant, Ombra, serves creative takes on Italian classics. “It’s hard to always satisfy the clientele who, especially when of a certain age, can have very personal ideas about what Italian food is or should be.”

He’s noticed the massive shift towards a more Americanised style of Italian cooking but isn’t necessarily opposed to change. “While I’m not against the idea of bastardising certain dishes, sometimes my heart does skip a beat when I see dishes such as smoked eel carbonara on some east London menus.”

Chiavarini has a theory that the nation’s newfound desire for hearty, uncomplicated dishes such as spaghetti and meatballs comes from the difficult times we’re going through globally. “I think a lot of these trends come down to timing. Restaurants are emotional businesses and they often reflect how the nation is feeling. Every time the world gets itself into a mess we see a resurgence of very comforting dishes.”

Meatballs and spaghetti

Serves 4-6

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 16-20 good-quality meatballs (store-bought or homemade, see below)
• 400g dried spaghetti
• 50g parmesan
• Handful of torn basil leaves, to serve (optional)

For the sauce

• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 carrot, grated
• 1 tbsp dried mixed herbs
• 4 garlic cloves, crushed
• 1 tsp paprika
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1 × 400g tin chopped tomatoes
• 1 tbsp tomato purée
• 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

1. To make your own meatballs, fry 1 very finely chopped onion (it’s important to chop it super-fine to ensure the meatballs don’t break up) in 1 tsp oil until the onion is softened and beginning to brown. Allow to cool for 10-15 min. Combine the onion with 800g minced (ground) beef, 50g panko or fresh breadcrumbs, 1 egg, 1 tbsp dried mixed herbs, 1 crushed or finely grated garlic clove and plenty of salt and pepper in a large bowl. Mix everything together well — I find it’s easiest to get your hands in and smush it all between your fingers. Shape the mixture into 20 equal-sized meatballs.

2. Heat the olive oil in a large non-stick frying pan (skillet) or saucepan with a lid over a medium heat. Add the meatballs and fry until browned all over; they don’t need to be cooked all the way through. Remove the meatballs from the pan and set aside. If your pan isn’t non-stick, you may wish to clean it at this point.

3. To make the sauce, warm the oil in the pan over a gentle heat. Add the onion, carrot and herbs and fry with the lid on for 10 min or until soft. Stir in the garlic and cook for 1 min. Add the paprika and cumin and cook for 1 min. Pour in the tinned tomatoes, plus about ¼ tin water. Add the tomato purée, Worcestershire sauce and vinegar. Season well, stir everything together and cook for 5 min.

4. Add the meatballs back into the pan — ideally in one layer, but if you need to stack a few it’ll be fine as they will shrink a little more. Cover and cook for 10 min, then remove the lid and cook for a further 10 min to thicken the sauce.

5. In the final 10 min, cook the spaghetti according to the packet instructions. Drain the spaghetti, reserving a little of the cooking water. Take about a cupful of tomato sauce from the meatballs and stir it through the spaghetti in the pan, adding a splash of the cooking water.

6. Divide the spaghetti between serving bowls and top with the meatballs and remaining sauce. Grate over some parmesan and garnish with a few basil leaves, if using.

Meatball subs

Drop the spaghetti and swap it for 4 medium baguettes. Cook the sauce down a little more so that it’s thicker and not at all runny. Ladle a few spoonfuls of sauce into each baguette, fill with meatballs and grate over plenty of parmesan.

The Tinned Tomatoes Cookbook: 100 Everyday Recipes Using the Most Versatile Ingredient in Your Kitchen by Samuel Goldsmith (Murdoch Books, £18.99). Photography by Mowie Kay. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members