In The Pasta Queen, TikTok superstar and bestselling cookbook author Nadia Caterina Munno travels through Italy to find where various kinds of pasta originated, as well as where some of the superior ingredients of amazing Italian dishes come from. Then, in her Florida home, she cooks a couple of those dishes, with the flair and enthusiasm that made her a social media star.
Opening Shot: A woman in a sports car drives the Italian countryside. “The key to any great Italian meal is exquisite ingredients and a sprinkle of drama.”
The Gist: In the first episode, Munno travels to Puglia, the region where orecchiette originated. “Orecchiette” (pronounced Ora-kyetti, not Ora-chetti, according to Munno) means “little ears” in Italian, and she sits with one of the Pasta Ladies in the Puglian city of Bari, who sit outside and make pounds of orecchiette every day, with movements so second nature they don’t even have to look down at what they’re doing. She then makes orecchiette del pomordoro cacioricotta.
In the middle segment, she makes pasta dough with her four children: Eleonora, 15;Gabriel, 14; Desiree, 11; and Penelope, 4. She shows them that the “Italian hand” (????) will help make the “volcano of love” in the flour, which is into where the eggs are cracked.
She then makes Cozze alla Tarantina, but first we see her in Taranto, Puglia, with her father Tonino; Munno will be going on a boat that will harvest mussels from a mussel farm. The water where the mussels grow there is so free of contaminants that the mussels can actually be eaten raw (and wiggling, she finds out).
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As much flair as Munno has, The Pasta Queen is a pretty straight-ahead travel and cooking show you might see on PBS, like Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. Cross that with Stanley Tucci: Searching For Italy, add some of the sex appeal that made Nigella Lawson and Giada De Laurentiis international superstars, and you have this show.
Our Take: How do you make a cooking show different than other cooking shows? By bringing a TikTok-mastered flair to the usual dump-and-stir proceedings, and that’s what Munno does with The Pasta Queen.
She sounds bit like an Italian version of Sofia Vergara, being loud and overpronouncing words for emphasis. She doesn’t take herself particularly seriously, and when she makes asides to a second camera, they look like they’re obviously edited in later, as well as moments when she mentions ingredient names while a fan blows her hair around.
Munno certainly makes things not only fun, but provides the warm feeling of home and family that makes the show even more fun to watch. In the first episode, her 4-year-old daughter Pepe wanders in while Munno is cooking the first dish and tells her mother that she doesn’t like the plum tomatoes she used to make the sauce, and as we mention above, there are segments with her father and all four of her kids.
Could her act wear thin over a 13-episode season? Maybe; but the producers — the series is produced by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine — intelligently intersperse the cooking segments with the travel segments, where her boldness meshes well with the locals that she talks to. It makes for a fairly well-paced and information-packed half-hour.
Sex and Skin: Munno gets a little sexy with the food, but in a restrained way.
Parting Shot: “Go make some orecchiette!” Munno says.
Sleeper Star: We want to see Munno’s 4-year-old daughter Pepe in every episode.
Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Munno’s schtick may be a bit over the top, but the enthusiasm she brings to Italian food and cooking makes The Pasta Queen a fun show to watch.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.