The Story Behind Bottega Cat

The first signs of Bottega Cat becoming a reality were in 2022 on a farm in New Lebanon NY, during evenings with a folding chair, cases of Labatt Blue, and the need to cook dinner. I did not know at the time what it would be called or what it would fully look like, but I knew it was about making a pasta that tasted different than others. 

Growing up in Brooklyn, one is never far away from great Italian or Italian-American foods. The pizza is plenty, mozzarella grows on trees, rainbow cookies are the best thing since the last plate of rainbow cookies you ate, and the gabba gools every day, just as sure as the sun rises. Despite the bounty, it has always been difficult to find a fresh pasta that had the power to transport me back to a porch in Italy and that feeling of sublime. 

After years working for GrowNYC Grains with an amazing selection of regional flours from the northeast, I realized that I was missing the point of it all: there’s no need to search for that pasta at all! Importing flour from Italy will never make a pasta taste like Italy. If you want that pasta, then go to Italy. Instead, an amazing pasta made here should taste like here. And so I did the thing I know how to do best: I went to the farmer’s market. For eggs, I reconnected with old pals at Feisty Acres to be around folks who were committed to learning just as much about poultry as I was about flour. Unfortunately I could no longer find the flour I wanted to use in the market, so there I turned to my parent’s pizzeria Amorina and sourced the flour through channels I knew from there. This later encouraged me to offer flour and other staple items for any other lost traveler searching for the best pie crust or dinner roll that could only be made with the blessing of their own hands. After lots of tinkering, fucking up, tasting, and dropping mysterious packages at friend’s doors, I’ve arrived at a product I feel good about bringing to my own kitchen table.