It’s all in the filling! How one LA restaurant keeps artisanal tortellini alive year-round

Pull up to nearly any refrigerated grocery aisle and you’re bound to find a take on the classic tortellini. From a four-cheese concoction to spinach and ricotta, these mass-produced pastas are anything but artisanal.

“Tortellini is made with one filling only,” says Giorgia Sinatra, creative director of L.A.’s family-run restaurant Pasta Sisters, “which is the pork, mortadella, prosciutto di parma, parmigiano reggiano, nutmeg, and eggs.”

Just the way Paoloa de Re, Sinatra’s mother and the chef behind Pasta Sisters, prepares it at the restaurant.

According to Sinatra, the meat-centric filling is one of the key components that go into an authentic artisanal tortellini. The other highlights include its unique ring-like shape and its precise weight of 5 grams.

“You have to have a specific ratio between pasta and filling. Usually, you have three grams of pasta for two grams of filling,” Sinatra notes.

However, perfecting the meticulous measurements and navel-like shape of the tortellini is an intensive, time-consuming process that found the Pasta Sisters serving the dish only two months out of the year — December and January; the winter holiday season when Italians traditionally served Tortellini al Brodo (tortellini in broth).

Despite customer demands, the handmaking process was too much for the family-run restaurant to handle year-round.

That was until a trip to Italy in 2022, when a friend from Emilia-Romagna — the regional birthplace of tortellini — introduced the family to an engineer fixated on crafting the perfect tortellini. This chance meeting brought the family face to face with a machine that, Sinatra expresses, perfectly reproduces artisanal tortellini.

Obsession with perfection

A variety of traditional Italian fresh tortellini on display in a local shop in Bologna, Italy

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“When we talk about tortellini, we’re talking about a very particular product,” she explains. And for some people this product becomes an obsession with perfection.

In 1974, that obsession turned into an outright cause when a group of concerned tortellini enthusiasts, dubbed the “Learned Brotherhood of Tortellino,” afraid that traditional Italian cuisine would be lost to time, registered the regional recipe of tortellini filling with the city of Bologna — forever cementing the distinct characteristics, flavors, and production of the perfect tortellini into history.

“When you meet hardcore people, they want to have a perfect tortellini.” And that perfect tortellini, Sinatra explains, has traditionally been made in Italy by women and children whose smaller hands are able to delicately wrap the filled pasta around their pinky — which is how the tortellini gets its distinct tiny navel-like shape, she notes.

So when the family saw that this machine was perfectly replicating the artisanal tortellini shape, they knew they had to bring it back home.

Mysterious machine

The tortellini machine and the man behind it are shrouded in secrecy. The Pasta Sisters themselves refrain from spoiling any details of either’s identity. Sinatra explains that this is partly due to several instances — from break-ins to payouts — where outside parties have attempted to steal their family recipes and practices.

What is shared is that the machine is so uncommon that, as Sinatra tells it, the Pasta Sisters is the only restaurant in the United States to use one.

Uncooked Tortellini prepared by Pasta Sisters

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Courtesy of Pasta Sisters

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Courtesy of Pasta Sisters

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The machine arrived at their second location in Culver City with guests in tow — the nephew of the inventor and a technician. Together, they stayed with the family for over a week to not only train their pasta makers on using the machine but to appraise the Pasta Sisters themselves.

“They are from Bologna, so they know how tortellini has to be, has to taste. They wanted to taste our filling,” she recalls, to ensure that their tortellini lived up to the standards of Bologna.

They passed.

Year-round tortellini

At Pasta Sisters’ two locations, tortellini is now made year-round with the machine — it’s been that way since 2023. Even so, they haven’t lost their human touch. The restaurant still cooks its filling by hand and the dough remains homemade. The only thing that’s changed, Sinatra says, is how quickly the artisanal tortellini can now be prepared.

While the machine helps expedite the process, it all comes down to the classic filling. “All these super good ingredients are in this little tiny dumpling and it’s an explosion of flavor when you eat it.”

And for customers, that’s all that matters. “That’s the part they’re excited about,” Sinatra says. “It’s the filling.”