True Italian Pasta Week is back and more carb-loaded than ever.

True Italian Pasta Week 2021 begins this Monday 22nd and runs through Sunday 28th.

Bigger than ever, this year there are 33 handpicked ‘True Italian’ restaurants participating throughout the city. Each one offering your choice of two delicious, regional, traditional, sometimes unique and challenging pasta dishes and a drink for the special price of €14.

The idea is simple: eat tasty and innovative (and affordable) pasta dishes at some of Berlin’s best and most authentic Italian restaurants. It’s the perfect excuse to discover somewhere new in your kiez, or reconnect with an old favourite or two.

Discover all 33 participating restaurants and find out what they’re cooking up here or check out this pasta U-Bahn map:

MINI – cinematic Italian home-cooking.

In the run-up to the event, we were invited to Urbanstrasse’s MINI to sample their True Italian Pasta Week creations.

Located at the edge of Kreuzberg’s ultra-schick Graeferkiez, MINI is part wine bar, part bistrot, part living room, part ode to cinema. Just as its name suggests, it’s small but perfectly formed – intimate, inviting, thoroughly charming.

Owners Elena and Daniele have put time, energy and love into making MINI feel just like the kind of place they’d want to spend time in. All rustic furniture, solid wooden tables, low-level lighting and jazzy lounge music, it has that kind of earthy, warm atmosphere that’s perfect for an autumnal evening.

Coming from Milan, by way of Chiavenna, Elena and Daniele’s food and drink selection reflects the kind of cooking Lombardia is famous for.

Daniele’s contribution is MINI’s signature drink – the Ginrosa, a bitter aperitif he serves shaken, with orange zest. MINI is the only place in Germany you can get it. On Elena’s side, it’s MINI’s signature dish, Pizzoccheri – a traditional dish served only in her home region of Chiavenna.

This dish, handmade Pizzoccheri with alpine cheese, potatoes, garlic, butter and pepper, is one of the dishes being offered for True Italian Pasta Week. A taste of winter comfort, strips of handmade buckwheat pasta and potato chunks are nestled amongst what can only be described as a fondue of rich, unctuous, almost smokey molten cheese and a butter-garlic sauce with enough garlic in it to make you cancel your next week’s appointments. It’s heavy – to say the least – but it’s luxury.

The second dish they’re offering is fresh maccheroncini with beef brisket, red wine, carrots, celery, and onions. This simple, understated dish is the patient product of 10-hours of braising, with tender, succulent, aromatic beef contrasting with the al-dente maccheroncini pasta, both pulled together by a more-than-healthy sprinkling of parmesan cheese.

Find out more about MINI here.

True Italian Pasta Week 2021 – 22nd to 28th November 2021

Facebook Event – Facebook Page – trueitalian.top – Instagram