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Doesn’t mean it’s fucking Bolognese.

I picked up some pasta from a spot downtown this evening (won’t put them on blast) and this was some bum shit. Taco Bell style ground beef, tomato sauce and over cooked “house made” pasta.

Bolognese better have carrots, celery and onions. Bolognese better have red wine. Bolognese better have been braised, deglazed and stewed for hours to develop deep, complex flavor. Add cream if you feeling horny, or some house tricks for finesse but If you don’t want to kill yourself by the time your done making it then you probably didn’t do it right. It’s a labor of love that pays off and anything else is spaghettiOs.

I know there are more important things I could write about but restaurants constantly use these hype words to entice guests and charge $4 more than what a dish is worth without any respect or admiration to the classics. Trust me, if you saw the words “spaghetti with meat sauce” on a menu instead of “Bolognese” you would think twice about spending $14. Yet restaurant owners don’t think twice about the words they use as long as it generates revenue and sounds fancy.

Same goes for aioli. Just because you mixed pesto and mayo together doesn’t make it “pesto aioli”. But hey it sounds foreign and looks nice and you’ll pay $1 more than that turkey panini is worth. Charlatans.

This is not to mean I am purely a classicist or hold a staunch position on cultural purity, especially when pertaining to food. I believe food, culture, etc. are not stagnant and should be open to evolving over time, but if you are going to call something “Bolognese” or “mapo tofu” etc. then it should be a good representation of that dish, otherwise just state that was the inspiration and call it Joe Dick’s styling beef pasta.

Throwing smoked salmon on top of rice doesn’t make it sushi and beef on top of pasta is not Bolognese. I rest my case.