Late-Night Spaghetti Is A Party Trend We Can Get Behind

It was my own fault for committing to five back-to-back events that zigzagged up, down, and crosstown, but on a recent Thursday night, my friend and I still added one more stop at Georgia Room. After posting up at the bar with our drink-ticket prosecco, we kept our heads on a swivel scanning the dance floor for what we’d made a detour for: the spaghetti.

Though I have no strong recollection of the pasta itself other than that it was served in paper bowls and pinched off the servers’ trays by other flagging guests, I do remember that it revived us sufficiently to get in a car back to Brooklyn… where we made a final final appearance at Gabriela. But while mid-function spaghetti at a mob-wife-themed party might seem like a one-off, it’s a lifesaving tradition-turned-emerging New York nightlife trend that’s also being continued at the party series Inferno and Suprema Provisions.

Bianca Bosso, who co-produces Spaghetti Disco with Kaitlin Prince of Authentic Hospitality, says the idea came from her childhood, during which her dad would whip up aglio e olio after every New Year’s celebration. She incorporated the practice into her pre-wedding festivities, then with Price at Georgia Room. “It’s just insane,” she says of the first time they brought out pasta, for which the pair hand-rolled the meatballs themselves. “We literally hear someone scream from outside the kitchen door, ‘What's the holdup?’ I open the door, and a mass of people are yelling at us, ‘Where's our pasta? I'm hungry.’ We thought it was just going to be people dancing and waiting politely for the pasta to come to them. No, they came to the pasta.”

Similarly, Stephen Werther, chef and owner of Suprema Provisions, says that since his Midnight Spaghetti concept opened to the public, there have been guests “waiting from the minute we open the window to when we close” at 2 a.m. on weekends, as well as dozens of repeat customers who’ve come back for the fresh Raffetto’s pasta paired with four sauces (and to-go cocktails). He cites post-COVID dining habits — “you're a little bewildered that a restaurant that was packed to the rafters is starting to get half-empty at 9:30 p.m.” — the lack of high-quality food available in the wee hours, and an increase in marijuana use as factors for Midnight Pasta’s early popularity. (He says he’s already had interest in bringing the business to other neighborhoods and cities.)

“It's maybe new to the U.S., but it's not new to the rest of the world,” says Werther, who was the late Anthony Bourdain’s business partner. “Certainly the Japanese have figured that out probably better than anybody else [with] izakayas. And some of that is starting to come around to New York … It's fun, it's delicious, it's social, and it keeps you from getting too drunk.”

And in a time where everything is an experience, there’s perhaps no better moment to keep rolling out the intra-rave ravioli. “I don't know if it would've worked 10 years ago,” Price says of coming up in the “models and bottles” phase of New York nightlife in the early 2000s. “But I think, now, people are so used to activations during events that they're fine with it. The first club I worked at was Kiss & Fly … If you served pasta at Kiss & Fly, people would've turned up their noses.”

But now, they’re bombarding Inferno founder Dante Cardenas with DMs about the midnight pasta at Jean’s. Cardenas says when the Noho restaurant presented him with the option of having food, he agreed because it reminded him of growing up with a strong post-club dining culture in Mexico — and because it would be another way of putting his partygoers, who are Studio 54-level diverse in age, location, and scene, into conversation with one another.

“We’re not only sharing ideas and conversations and music,” he says, “we’re also sharing food. So for me, that was an element I wanted to bring to Inferno — because the whole point is bringing a community together.”