It’s rare that you can pinpoint the time and place a pasta dish was invented—most of pasta history is the stuff of legend and folklore. But in the early 1960s, in the southern Italian region of Puglia, in the coastal city of Bari, at a restaurant called Al Sorso Preferito, spaghetti all’assassina—“assassin’s spaghetti”—was born.
In August 2022, I go to Al Sorso Preferito, where I meet the 80-year-old chef Pietro Lonigro, one of the inventors of the dish.
Chef Pietro tells me it happened by accident—and it didn’t exactly start with him. He began working at the restaurant at age 14, running errands and learning to cook from the restaurant’s then-owner, Vincenzo Francavilla. Chef Vincenzo often cooked a standard dish of spaghetti with tomatoes and dried chili peppers. But one time, it burned a bit on the bottom. Usually they would have thrown the pasta out, but instead the chefs ate it. And they were surprised to find that they actually liked those crunchy burnt bits, using one of my favorite Italian words to describe them—croccante, meaning “crunchy.” The word even sounds crunchy.
They started serving this crunchy new pasta to customers, who asked them to punch it up: more crunch, more spice, even a little more char. (By the way, the name comes from the dish’s spice—it was called spaghetti all’assassina even before the accidental burning. On my visit I found it to be hot by Italian standards but barely medium to my palate overall.) Chef
