08/28/2026
Chitarra alla gricia. My favorite thing on the menu right now.
Gricia is Roman, and it is the one everybody skips over. No egg, no tomato, no crutch. Just guanciale, pecorino, black pepper, and pasta water. Rome built carbonara and amatriciana on top of it, but gricia came first.
There is nowhere to hide in a dish like this, so it comes down to two things.
The guanciale, which we import from Italy. Cured pork jowl, fattier and funkier than pancetta, and it renders down into the fat that carries the whole sauce.
And the cheese. Pecorino alone is sharp and salty and wants to break on you. So we cut it with Parmigiano, which brings the nuttiness and helps the sauce hold. Blended with that rendered fat and a little starchy pasta water, it emulsifies into something glossy and stable that clings to every strand instead of clumping in the bottom of the bowl.
Chitarra is square spaghetti. The name comes from the old Abruzzese tool, a wooden frame strung with wires like a guitar. We extrude ours through bronze dies in house, but the shape is the same, and those flat edges and rough surface are exactly what a sauce this simple needs to grab onto.
Salty, peppery, rich. Three ingredients doing a lot of work. Incredibly crushable.
