At Bottega 26 in Nha Trang, you can order Bolognese twice and have two different lunches. The first time, you wind homemade fettuccine around your fork and lift a ribbon coated in slow-cooked beef ragù. The second time, you order the same sauce with mezze maniche. A little ragù slips inside each tube and stays there until you bite down.
Same kitchen, same pot of ragù. All you changed was the pasta.
First, choose the sauce
Look at the three bowls. If one were yours, which would you reach for? On the left, our homemade basil pesto coats the ridges of the pasta, with shrimp tucked between the tubes. At the bottom, the beef ragù is thick enough to sit on top. On the right, you can see the creamy sauce just inside the open ends.
If you’re still deciding, try another question. Do you want the heat of tomato sauce with a cool spoonful of stracciatella? That’s Spicy Sorrentina. Would you rather have sausage and mushrooms in a cream sauce? Order Creamy. Once you know what you’re hungry for, the menu gets a lot shorter. Explore the pasta sauces
Then, choose the pasta
Those little pieces in the middle of the board are our homemade potato gnocchi. We make them from potatoes, and it’s that soft bite you’re choosing them for. Try them with Spicy Sorrentina. Pick up one gnocco, a little tomato and a little stracciatella together. Try Spicy Sorrentina
On the right are our homemade fettuccine. The broad ribbons give the ragù plenty to hold on to. If you like taking your time over a bowl of pasta, winding a few ribbons at a time, this is how we’d order the Bolognese. Try Bolognese
On the left are mezze maniche, the short, ridged tubes from the three bowls above. They’re especially good with the shrimp pesto. A tube and a shrimp fit neatly on the same fork, and the hollow centre carries a little extra basil pesto with it. Try the pesto with shrimp
Finally, choose the size
For the pasta dishes above, you can choose Small or Regular. We like Small when there’s something else on the table you want to try. It also settles a familiar disagreement: if one of you wants pesto and the other wants ragù, order a small dish of each and swap halfway through. If you’ve been thinking about fettuccine Bolognese since breakfast, go straight for Regular.
Unless, of course, you want cannelloni
Then the question is what you want inside. We fill our Vegetarian Cannelloni with spinach and ricotta and our Meatlover Cannelloni with minced beef. Both go into the oven under béchamel. See that browned patch near the edge of the dish? That’s where we’d put the fork first. Choose spinach and ricotta or minced beef.