Director Discusses His Documentary on Famous American Pasta Chef
“Funke” director Gab Taraboulsy poses in his Cinecitta’ tee shirt with his own hand crafted mattarello.
When AMHS member Lourdes Tinajero went to a film festival a couple years ago, walked into a theater and saw on the screen a big, bearded, bald-headed guy with tattoos standing in front of a gun case and heard the ominous sound effects, she thought she had walked into the wrong theater. It turns out she was in exactly the right place to see a film about a very unusual and talented pasta chef named Evan Funke, an American sfoligno with an outsized personality. As a member of our program committee, Lourdes thought this was just the right film to discuss during an AMHS virtual program, so she reached out to the producer/director of that documentary “Funke,” Gab Taraboulsy, whom she had met at that May 2019 Washington International Film Festival. Gab is definitely an appassionato of food, film and storytelling of edible arts.
He said his interest in pasta no doubt goes back to his mother and grandmother, who thought pasta was the answer to everything and who took him to Italy several times when he was growing up. Gab was interviewed from his home in Los Angeles on June 12, 2021, by AMHS member Kirsten Keppel, who is a documentary filmmaker herself. In 2011, Kirsten represented our Society at Molisani nel mondo in Campobasso, Molise, 10 minutes from her great-grandparents’ villages of Riccia and Jelsi. Kirsten also gave us a talk in March 2019 on her documentary film, ”Ringraziamenti:
The St. Joseph’s Table Tradition,” which won an award from the National Italian American Foundation.
Evan Funke with his handmade mattarello which he uses to make world-class pasta.
As Kirsten noted, the beginning of the film grabs your attention. It’s different and extraordinarily effective in capturing the audience’s attention. In the opening scene, you hear Funke’s booming voice and watch as he opens his “pasta case” (not a gun case!). As Kirsten pointed out in the interview with Gab, there are two major themes beautifully interwoven in this documentary — the skill and beauty of making diverse, authentic pasta and the huge, passionate personality of a chef and pasta advocate.
Gab explained that before making the Funke documentary, he had been working on shortform culinary film-making. But he decided he wanted to tell a longer story, and he thought Evan Funke’s comeback would be a great start — how in his turbulent early career, after his first restaurant went under, he went from radio silence and falling off the map, to roaring back with the hugely popular restaurant Felix in Venice, California (Esquire Magazine rated it the best new restaurant in America in 2017). Gab said Evan’s point of view is that pasta is an art form, a craft. He can make 188 out of the 365 documented shapes of pasta. (He says the first kind of pasta he ever made was agnolotti, and he can tell his agnolotti from every other in the world). Their idea was to slow down the magic trick and build in a studio what they imagined a pasta lab to be.
He said they spent 4 days filming every imaginable shape of pasta. Many of the scenes were shot in Italy. One of the wonderful people in the film is an Italian woman named Nunzia Caputo, who surely holds the world record for making orecchiette, the little ear-shaped pasta. This remarkable woman is in her sixth decade of making orecchiette in Arco Basso, in her Bari Vecchia neighborhood in Puglia. Gab explained that he found Nunzia through Evan, and he learned that she is a local celebrity with her own You Tube videos (including a great one of her trip to New York). Asked how fast she made the pasta, Gab said “stop watches don’t go that fast!” And he said even more amazing is that Nunzia would watch Italian soap operas and talk on the phone meanwhile. Now that’s impressive!! Gab commented that the scenes of Nunzia, the Bologna pasta school maestra Alessandra Spisni, and Davide Occhi making a mattarello (the long, wooden pasta rolling pin) by hand are all rituals that really bring you into the Italian culture. When Kirsten asked Gab how the making of the film affected him personally, he noted that he has begun taking Italian lessons and that he has a deeper appreciation of the culture of Italy, culinary and otherwise.
Gab said the 90 days he thought he would spend making the film turned ou.t to be 2 years
During the interview, Gab showed off his beautiful hand-made mattarello which he got in Bologna, and which he said is now sold out online. He said the day before they planned to shoot scenes at the mattarello factory of Davide Occhi, they asked if they could come the following day. Evan brought along his mattarello, which Davide confirmed had been hand-made by his father. While in Bologna, they also shot scenes at La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese, founded in 1993 by Alessandra Spisni and billed as the only school in the world that trains sfoglini (pasta makers). Evan said Alessandra would tell him to keep rolling the dough until you could hold it up to the window and see the San Luca Church across the way. It’s no wonder she has trained thousands of students from all over the world at her school and is known as the “Queen of Pasta.” Evan named one of the dishes he would later make at his restaurant ragù bolognese vecchia scuola.
Gab said the 90 days he thought he would spend on the film turned out to be 2 years. In making the documentary, the 400 hours they shot had to be cut down to 90 minutes, and Gab says he owes a huge debt of gratitude to his partner Alex Emanuele, who did the editing. To whittle the film down that much, he said Alex “always had a next move, and maybe a move after that.” So Kirsten asked Gab if he could tell us about a favorite scene that was left on the cutting room floor. He said that would be the scene where Evan goes hunting for truffles with a truffle hunter and his dog. Off they went into the woods after a rain, hunting for the elusive truffles. The dog finally finds one, earning a “bravo, bravo” and a big hug from his owner. A poignant scene is where Evan holds the truffle in his big hand and says,“it’s like finding gold!” Gab played these scenes for us sharing his computer, and it was really one of the highlights of the interview.
He noted that the name of the truffle hunting town is Savigno, just outside of Bologna, and there’s a marquee restaurant there called Amerigo Dal 1934 which has gorgeous murals commemorating truffle hunting dogs of generations past. Back in L.A., as Evan finally gets ready in the film to open his restaurant, Kirsten noted the diversity of the clients — a Japanese man who is first in line on opening day, a hockey player, and an Italian who said the food reminded him of home. Gab noted that Evan has developed a big social media following, so people come to his restaurant from all over the world. Kirsten noted that Evan Funke’s Felix Trattoria is one of the most popular restaurants in Los Angeles. And her last question was whether he planned to open a restaurant on the East Coast — like maybe in Washington, D.C.? Gab said he knows that Funke is a “hungry entrepreneur” who has plans to expand, so maybe a restaurant in D.C. is in the cards.
We thank our audience for joining us, including Kirsten’s 16-year-old family member in Italy who stayed up until 3 a.m. to watch the program and who is himself a budding pastiao (see article on p. 8). We also thank Kirsten for her terrific interview, and Lourdes Tinajero for connecting us to Gab. Thanks also to program committee members Chris Renneker and Maria D’Andrea-Yothers, and to Peter Bell for hosting the meeting. And of course, a big thank you to Gab, who was just amazing. ❚
