Gia's Italian Kitchen's Podcast
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Gia's Italian Kitchen's Podcast
Episode 4.17 - How Gargiulo’s Created Its Signature Penne Pasqualina
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Cannolis, Pasta, Family, and Capone! I interviewed Chef Matthew Cutolo at Gargiulos Restaurant on Coney Island in Brooklyn, NY about all of these things, and more!
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There are Italian dishes you can order anywhere, and then there are the plates that only exist because one restaurant decided to do things its own way and never let the standard slip. We zero in on Gargiulo’s Penne Pasqualina, the signature pasta that regulars treat like a landmark: zucchini, onion, fresh tomato, prosciutto, and a sauce people keep trying to decode after the last bite.
The backstory goes straight to a pivotal moment in restaurant history. When the catering hall was added in 1983, the kitchen suddenly had to scale from a dining room of roughly 120 guests to cooking for hundreds at a time. That kind of growth can dilute quality fast, so the team brought in Chef Carlo Pamigiano from Italy to teach large-scale execution without losing precision. Out of that pressure and training, Penne Pasqualina was born, and it didn’t just survive the banquet line, it became the dish everyone associates with the restaurant.
We also get honest about the question that always starts an argument: what makes the “light cream sauce” light? The answer includes heavy cream, but the real magic is how parmigiano and pasta water pull everything together into a balanced, cohesive bite that still feels rooted in pasta technique. If you care about classic Italian-American cooking, restaurant consistency, and why some recipes should not be reinvented, you’ll want to hear this one.
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Menu Favorites Set The Scene
SPEAKER_00Ha okay, so you've got that. You've got, and I want to talk about the cannolis, but the tiramisu, the um the baked clams, you you highlighted that. And then but talk about this um penny pasqua, is it Pasqualini? Pasqualine.
SPEAKER_01Pasqualina.
SPEAKER_00So that's a signature dish of the restaurant. So tell us about that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so in in 1983, when we added the catering hall on, you know, we were accustomed to cooking for the dining room, which was, you know, about 120 people, maybe some small parties here or there. But now we were all of a sudden really cooking for the masses, hundreds of people at one time. So my great uncle Mike, he hired a chef from Italy, Carlo Pamigiano, and he came over and he helped
The Origin Of Penne Pasqualina
SPEAKER_01us, you know, he trained us how to cook, you know, large scale.
SPEAKER_00Uh okay.
SPEAKER_01One of the dishes that we developed when he came over here was Pene Pascolina, and it's zucchini, onion, fresh tomato, prosciutto, and a light cream sauce. And it just took off, and that became one of our signature dishes that everybody knows and loves. And, you know, I always say you go to any Italian restaurant, you could get maranata, you could get bologners, but there's only one place in the world you could get penetalina, and that's at Gargiulo's.
SPEAKER_00That's awesome. So did you modify it at all, or was that, or were those lists of ingredients exactly what they okay?
SPEAKER_01The pascolina, and I can tell you so many other dishes, practically the whole menu has been the original, you know, recipes and and the way we've done it over so many years. I mean, maybe there's been minor tweaks or changes, plated different things like that, but the core of everything has stayed the same. And I think that's part of you know the longevity that we have is because we stick to those things.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Okay, so and hopefully you can reveal this. I this might be like a trade secret, but what what
Why The Recipes Stay The Same
SPEAKER_00is the the light cream sauce that goes in there? Because typically when you're in Italy, the sauces are not creamy, and if they are creamy, it's from the pasta water and the pecorino or the parmigiana. Yeah. It's not actual dairy. So are you can you tell us?
SPEAKER_01There is there is heavy cream. There is definitely heavy cream in there. But like you said, when you mix the parmigiano and the pasta water, you know, it all comes together in the in the perfect bite.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Amazing. Okay.