In order to understand the division in the world today, you must understand the
unification of Italy. In order to understand Italy, you must understand pasta. And if you are unfortunate enough to live in Los Angeles, you fortunately have a hero to guide you, the “Prince of Pasta," Evan Funke.
Evan just opened a new restaurant, his third, an ambitious endeavor in a historic art deco building in which no expense was spared. His previous two, Felix and Mother Wolf, were unquestionably huge hits in the competitive and complex dining scene of Los Angeles. I previously reviewed Mother Wolf. His new project, a three-story pasta extravaganza complete with a rooftop bar, bears his name: Funke.
There is a difference between a nobleman and a hero. Nobility are merely admired. Heroes and legends change our behavior. Ryan Gosling may be attractive, but Elon Musk inspired a whole generation of engineers and entrepreneurs. Theseus was more than a king, Orpheus more than a musician, and Evan Funke is more than a chef.
There is no courage in the absence of real danger. The people of Athens begged Theseus not to face the minotaur, for they believed it was certain death. And Evan was believed insane for opening a restaurant centered on expensive handmade pasta and focaccia perfectly soaking up meaty and creamy sauces surrounded by big balls of burrata to a city of self-professed gluten-free vegans, who were more willing to daily imbibe a half-dozen pharmaceutical and recreational drugs than eat a slice of buttered toast.
Evan saw through their ruse, and he healed them of their hunger and psychiatric self-
deception. Theseus knew how to defeat the minotaur's maze, and Evan saw right through the facade of the Instagram generation. They could not admit it, but deep down, he knew, carbs are king. And they always have been.
Grains, such as the wheat berry, along with corn, barley, and rye, seem to be eternal. They have no wild counterparts. They are commonly found at the most ancient of archaeological sites around the world. The Egyptians claimed wheat, like the alphabet, was a gift from the gods. Grains are also astonishingly productive. A single wheat berry turns in to a hundred, a kernel of corn in to a thousand, all in a few months. The whole grain is also uncannily ideal for nutrition, mapping almost perfectly to the needs of a human and many animals, and can be eaten whole or milled and baked in a seemingly endless variety of ways.
And yet, the modern world, soaked in a stale, weak vinaigrette of anti-traditionalism, has
not only turned against religion, monarchy and nobility, it has beheaded bread. Mammon, the god of money, hates bread for the same reason kings have always loved it, it brings abundance. Mammon and his private equite acolytes profit off private prisons while shutting down beloved restaurants. They feed on fear and scarcity. Bread is worth little money, we are told, pasta even less.
Better then to tune in eternally to a computer screen, to live and work in the mines of the symbol analyzers, the button pushers and image worshippers, believing working with nature is beneath us. But now the tech workers are being laid off by the legion. And the AI is poised to obsolesce even this sad existence.
What has this revolution brought us? Health and prosperity? America is a dumpster fire.
Even the restaurants have big bright screens to keep us distracted from this fact, as if we
cannot spend a moment away from our beloved mass media despot, Tyrant Television. But the food is unfit for a compost heap. In the midst of terror and strife, it is understandable that people will look to the past for answers. And the road of western culture leads directly back to Rome, to what we now call "Italy."
• • •
There is no such thing as Italy. This Mediterranean peninsula has no less than 20 distinct
historical, cultural, and culinary regions. Each has seemingly similar but truly different
takes on life. And by life I mean bread, wine, meat, cheese, and fresh produce.
Italy was “unified” over a long and bloody period officially but debatably considered to have begun in 1848 and lasting until the end of World War I, 1918. Then of course came
fascism, then another brutal war, then decades of globalization that the Italians largely
consider to have undermined and exploited their economy, lives, and culture. Today there is a Microsoft campus in Milan.
This process was famously encouraged by Machiavelli, who saw the need for a “prince" to unify Italy and lead her into the coming modern world of powerful nation states, not city states.
Machiavelli's emphasis on the real, or practical regime over the ideal state emphasized by Plato is largely considered the beginning of modern politics. However, it is worth noting that the “state" itself discussed by Plato was really the Greek polis, the political community, the city, but not a city with multiple political communities, which is every modern city.Plato and all classical philosophers seemed to take for granted the supremacy of cities such as Athens, Jerusalem, or Rome, over a nation state, a concept that did not exist until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Maps before this period focused on cities and rivers. There were no borders.
The effect of unification on the once wealthy and glorious city of Naples, the inventors of lasagna, has been well exposited by Curtis Yarvin. Many accounts of travelers to Italy, in particular southern Italy soon after unification, reported on the sad state of the population, many of whom were emaciated or starving. Can you imagine! Some of the most fertile soil in the world, an abundance of fresh water, a climate so ideal that one can collect two complete harvests in a single year. And the people starved. Unification may have had its benefits, but it did not benefit the pasta. Machiavelli eventually got his prince however, in the journalist dictator Benito Mussolini.
I'm no fascist, but Mussolini did at least one good thing for Italy. One of the reasons Italy is so nice today is Mussolini, thanks to his autocratic power, was finally able to kick out the mafia. Guess where they went though. America. The mafia-run Bank of America, for example, is really the Bank of Italy.
Modern Italy is generally treated as three regions, North, known for Milan, Central, which is dominated by Tuscany, and South, which includes the large island of Sicily. Evan began his quest in Bologna, a beautiful city in the Emilia-Romagna region of the North. This region also contains Parma, the origin of prosciutto di parma, and of course Parmigiano Reggiano, the “king of cheeses". It was here Evan learned the ancient and sacred art of the sfoglino, of hand rolled pasta. By now, he has graduated to the royal art, orecchiette.
If you have never made fresh pasta, I recommend it. Evan's book American Sfoglino is a great place to start. Like bread, pasta is simple to make but can take a lifetime to master. Unlike bread however, pasta does not use yeast. It does not even use salt. For most pastas, the dough is only flour and water, though many pastas use eggs. Notably, the flour used in pasta comes from a different type of wheat than breads, cakes, and pastries, the durum berry. There are also delicious green spinach pastas made in Italy, and many other styles can be found in Asia. If you are in New York, try Xian Famous Foods for some amazing Chinese hand-pulled noodles. Another incredible pasta restaurant in Los Angeles is Barrique, justifiably famous for their red beet pasta. Surely even more delicious pastas are waiting to be discovered.
Like bread, the difference between fresh and dried pasta can be immense, though dried
pasta does last much longer than bread, and machine rolled and extruded pastas can be made cheaply. Industrially produced spaghetti, macaroni, and ramen have fed countless budget conscious eaters. However, it would be a mistake to see pasta existing only in this compromised state.
As the machines took over pasta production, the art of handmade pasta began to die out, only maintained in small pockets of Italy and Japan. But Evan was not going to let the tradition die. Something drove him to do the insane, to laboriously and skillfully spend hours doing what we have long had machines do for us, make pasta.
• • •
It was my last night in Los Angeles when I visited Funke. I have given ten years to this
urban hell and watched it descend deeper, and I was moving out. Los Angeles is the desert where authenticity went to die a century ago. It's the coldest warm place on earth. Nowhere else do the health-obsessed look so sickly.
It would however be unfair to judge Los Angeles for something it isn't trying to be. Los
Angeles is deeply anti-traditional, and deeply immoral. LA produces the lion's share of
America's only remaining export: pornography. Hollywood executives have gotten away
with being serial rapists for a hundred years. The streets overflow with drugs. Crime is
rampant. The homeless advance on every front. LA is home to the most corrupt politician in California, Maxine Waters, which is like being the fattest kid at fat camp. Plato argued that the good city is based on virtue and civility. Los Angeles is what you get when these are not only ignored, but rebelled against.
Life in Los Angeles is Deleuze's dividual. There is you. And there is the image of you.
There is Los Angeles. And there is the image of Los Angeles. In Italy you are always seeing people and food. In Los Angeles you are always seeing images of people and images of food.
What you actually see in Los Angeles, in the rare moments you are not hypnotized by a
screen, is the back of the car in front of you, automobile ass and asphalt. Images of giant
angry women on billboards stare at you disapprovingly, threateningly. Many of them are
holding guns. The buildings are dilapidated grey boxes. Homeless encampments are taking over. The nicest neighborhood, Malibu, has three liquor stores, two weed dispensaries, and no bakery. There is a single bakery in the entire sprawling mess of a city worth mentioning, Jyan Isaac. God bless you, Jyan.
The city is not without its aesthetic charms, as a visit to the Bungalow will still inform you, but it is, like everything else in the city, a trick. The beauties of Los Angeles are impossible to love. They are already in love, with their iPhone, with their image of themselves.
Funke, located in the heart of Beverly Hills, was quite the scene. On the way in expensive
cars rumbled with aging Drake tracks. I sat next to two Chinese influencers who spent their entire multi-hour visit on their multiple iPhones, barely touching their food or speaking to each other, only taking pictures. Insecure looking lawyers, bankers, and entertainers, regime stooges, flirted with age inappropriate women.
Such is LA. But the pieces that were under Evan's control were sublime. The real scene wasa glass cube in the middle of the restaurant where we could watch the pasta being made. It was mesmerizing. The rest of the restaurant overflowed with beautiful marble, hand blown light fixtures and modern but tasteful art. Even the wine list was printed on fine paper, a detail rarely paid attention to. How could one list fine Brunellos and Barbarescos on translucent Hammermill copy paper? But many do, or worse, assault us with hideous QR codes. The lovingly designed and printed menu also told the story and region of each hand-crafted pasta. Brilliant. In a world with more abstraction than context, little stories like these breathe life into us. And then there was the staff.
Service is the difference between a good restaurant and a great one. And the service at all of Evan's restaurants has always been superb. The staff I had the pleasure of interacting with were attentive, knowledgeable, and kind, which is impressive for such a large multi-story space.
But there's more. The staff all spoke about Evan in a particular way. They enjoyed working with him and they admired him. Though the work was demanding, they enjoyed the day to day and, crucially, they felt part of something bigger. They were carrying and innovating on an important tradition. It also probably didn't hurt that the restaurants are all wildly popular. After the influencers departed, they were replaced by a lovely couple that had, in the two weeks it had been open, visited three times. Many nice restaurants get a single visit from a customer. Only the finest command such repetition.
Of course, critiques could be levied. One of my favorite features of Italian restaurants is
drinking glass bottles of water free of fluoride, which is illegal in Italy. They only had
filtered tap, though it did come in sparkling. Limoncello, an essential companion to a real Italian meal, was absent from the drink list, though the bar did have it. The music was loud and stressful, though this is table stakes at an LA restaurant, and, as other critics have pointed out, the menu is quite similar to Mother Wolf. Then again, once perfection on a theme is approached, how different does it need to be?
At Funke, Evan has begun to indulge in himself not as an image, but as a symbol. The
difference is subtle but crucial. The menus featured his distinct bearded silhouette, the staff wore pins with a stylized “F." The check came with a complimentary postcard featuring his pasta tools. This did not strike me as vain. I found it regal.
Machiavelli famously stated it is better to be feared than loved. But this is taken out of
context. Leadership is hard. If you have to choose, Machiavelli suggested choosing the
former. But, he says, it is of course better still to be both respected and liked. Evan has
achieved this. I thought of all the people I know that have worked for Elon Musk. They
respected him, yes, he is very creative yes, but they all hated him.
Still, it would be better than working for global finance hero Steve Schwarzman, whose
company PSSI was recently found using children to do hazardous slaughterhouse labor
when they showed up to school, tired after working all night, with acid burns. Many ivy
league graduates look up to Schwarzman, to the detriment of others and their own souls. But what are we to do? If he retired, one even worse would take his place. We do not need a new man, we need a new Man, a new archetype.
What a strange time, for our heroes to be not farmers and hunters, athletes within nature, not musical men of art and enlightenment, but boys of business and sports, actors who do naught but imitate, creatives who do naught but desecrate. Our criterion for heroes is inverted. Surely a correction will come.
• • •
Far, far away from Musk and Schwarzman, Bologna is as close to the ideal city as I have ever seen. And Los Angeles is just as far away from it. Why, Evan do you believe in us? Why not stay in paradise? Why pitch your tent among the sick, and suffer in order to try to elevate us? Why would they listen now?
California has turned its back on bread. It has turned its back on natural law. It has turned its back on God. As sure as the waves crash in the ocean, this will lead to its downfall. This is happening right in front of us. But now something even worse is happening. The Californians, poisoned in body and mind, packing ill gotten money, are invading the rest of America. They have targeted the precious few acres where traditions have been maintained and they burst in with their synthetic fabrics, their toy Teslas, their iPhone addictions, their Zoom psychiatrist sessions, their rainbow flags, and their dreaded vegan restaurants. Are the flags really necessary? It makes it feel like a military occupation.
Can we afford to give up on California? Is it already time to abandon the union? Would we be better off if we cut it off, or must we heal it in order to heal ourselves? Do we even have a choice? The cartels that control the screens and through them people's minds are in California. It may not appear that we must feed and heal the sick in Beverly Hills in order to save Bozeman, but it may be the case. Perhaps this is a good thing. Surely people will be healthier when they leave a place where the food, water, and air are all poisoned and get off drugs. The justified fear though is they will bring the bad ideas and drugs to their new homes, which has been happening. Bozeman now sports a billboard at its entrance warning Californians to stay away.
Why Los Angeles, Evan? Doesn't Wally's across the street make a good enough pizza?
Imagine what you could do for a Jackson, an Ojai, a Bozeman, a Chattanooga, or a Mobile. Or would that be compromising your favorite currency: authenticity? Perhaps it is up to the local entrepreneurs to stand up to their usurer prince who sends their money abroad and do the unthinkable, invest in a nice restaurant. How many places are there in your polis where you can get good food, with good service, at a good price? Probably very few. But this is what everyone wants. Clearly we do not live in a democracy.
But wait, Evan, isn't all this authenticity merely imported from Italy? It is not our own, and thus by Plato’s justice, every man having and doing what is his own, it is not just. With the closing of the Pacific Dining Car, Los Angeles now lacks a single nice American restaurant. Will Los Angeles, or America, ever be able to produce its own authenticity again, or have we lost it forever to the grey goo of globalism? Do we have anything to be proud of other than sodomy? Is there anything to write about other than punditry?
With Hatchet Hall making waves in LA with cornbread, elk, and fried green tomatoes, I
believe there is hope for America. Chefs Brian Dunsmoor, or Sean Brock, will show you
what cornbread can be, but that is only because Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills showed
them what corn can be. These men are heroes. The food at Hatchet Hall is Southern, but at least the authenticity is imported from somewhere in America. Port cities must always to some degree collect their culture from the countryside.
Americans have loved cornbread since Iroquois times, we cannot let it die. But local flavors like cornbread and okra are under assault, as the cartel-controlled Whole Foods moves into more neighborhoods, pushing California avocados and wine, and starving the farmers who grow local traditions. Get behind me, Satan. We do not need global food. Italy importedtomatoes from America. They are American, not Italian. With its wonderful climate, soil, abundance of rivers, and culture of dignity in craftsmanship, America was for many years known for lucrative exports of fine food and clothing. By 1775, the American colonies were exporting more than the entire rest of the British empire. Washington’s vision was for America to be at once independent and the “breadbasket of the world.” Now we import food and fertilizer from thousands of miles away, grow corn for the oil cartel, and enslave our aging farmers with usury and policy. We are setting ourselves up for the unthinkable: a famine.
If you read Machiavelli, be sure to realize that The Prince was not written to you. It was
written to a tyrant. In fact, don't read The Prince. Read the far better Discourses on Livy.
Machiavelli points out that people have a bad habit of honoring those that have the
potential to help them, and never do, over the people that actually do help them. He saw men fawning over the rich and powerful and ignoring the man, or the wife, that provided them their daily bread.
This is a deep sickness in America. The hypnotized agonize over images of lawyer
politicians, sell their very souls to buddy up with billionaires, and hardly ever pay attention to or appreciate the person that grows their food or runs their favorite restaurant. They deserve your respect, not the mafia mercenaries on television. If you want to survive, if you want America to survive, know your farmer. Know and appreciate who provides your pasta. The closer to home you keep them the better.
Like Gandhi, who came from a family of grocers, Evan sees the beauty and power of what is often seen as an outdated village industry. Gandhi loved spinning fabric, Evan loves rolling pasta. This is the road to freedom without violence. Gandhi was both respected and liked. I certainly respect that a man without a bank account became more powerful to his people than the King of England. Gandhi was a good Prince.
Also like Gandhi, Evan seems to be a man beyond sectarianism. Is he a traditionalist, calmly carrying the torch of tagliatelle, or is he an innovator, brashly putting meyer lemons and pistachio on pizza? Is he a conservative, a law abiding small businessman and leader, or a liberal, rolling pasta side by side with his employees, as if every man and woman were equal above the dough? Is he a founder, creator, and force of masculine strength, or is he tender, a provider, a man willing and eager to listen to his mostly female teachers?
One thing is certain though. Evan Funke is a hero. Since Felix opened, more and more LA
restaurants have changed their behavior. Handmade pastas and wood or at least gas fired pizza ovens are popping up everywhere. Bread and cheese are on the menu again. It seems Evan has single handedly saved us from the dark ages of anti-food, of sugar free beverages, vegan cheese, gluten free avocado toast, and vinaigrette drizzled kale. It would have been better to starve. But thanks to Evan, we will have bread, and we will have it abundantly.
Between Strauss and Burnham, between Machiavelli and Plato, between Marx and Jesus, runs an eternal golden thread of bucatini. Do we seek the ideal or the real? Do we seek heaven or earth? Do we seek the truth or accept what we are told? Do we seek money-making girlfriends or bread-baking wives? What we seek we will find.
Most people are uninterested in, or too busy for philosophy. And that is why the restaurant is so important today. It is one of the only things Mammon has not turned in to grey goo, though he and his price obsessed followers are trying. The restaurant is, thankfully, a bad business. This makes it a wonderful church. Chefs like Evan do not act out of greed. They are searching for something higher. They are the only priests left that people listen to. And they speak through food. This is important since, as Gandhi said, spiritual truth cannot be communicated with English.
The journalist dictators can rearrange the Roman letters as much as they want. They will
never reach anyone the way a lovingly baked loaf of bread can. This is why the Symposium tradition was so important in Athens. It would get people in a state in which they would actually listen to others, and listen to themselves. The dinner party is a powerful medium, and handmade pasta is a way to do it well without inviting Mammon. Almost anything else is mere distraction. Dinners are the bread and butter of philosophers, nobility, and statesmen. Jefferson's Monticello went through over 1000 bottles of wine per year.
• • •
If you are in Los Angeles, I encourage you to dine and imbibe your way through all of
Evan's restaurants. He will probably be there at one of them. Feeding the hungry, healing the sick, inspiring and caring for his workers, carrying on tradition and breathing life into it.
As America dives headfirst in to election propaganda clown world, I will be head down,
binding books and making bread and pasta, the forgotten village industries that make life worth living. I don't want to go to space anymore. I don't want to change the world. I want to know who grows my wheat and I want to be kind to them. The village is not the new city, it is the new nation.
I was once so busy changing the world from my computer screen I forgot how to work,
forgot how to cook, forgot how to live or to make live, how to grow. Theseus hunted his
own game. Washington waxed poetic in his love for manure. Gandhi made his own
clothing. Even the Pharaoh, the god-king of Egypt, would ritualistically put his hand to the plow. A life without sweat is no life at all.
The Prince that unified America, George Washington, was a farmer, which he saw as the
noblest vocation. Mount Vernon grew 30 kinds of grain and had its own mill, which
operates to this day. Now that we live under a despotism of journalists, lawyers, and
usurers, and nobody is in charge, it may be time to leave the collapsing port cities and
return to the farm, return to the river. As Spider Jerusalem says, every vote is a vote for
television.
Some say the doors of tradition are closed, and we must invent a new way of life if our
current one isn't working. Whatever the new synthesis is, we will need a different kind of
Prince, a virtuous provider, not a television lawyer. And yet, Emerson believed the
greatness of America was that every man could be the king of his home, and every woman a queen. That we wouldn't need princes at all.
As the politicians of Los Angeles weather one corruption scandal after another, as the
American nobility continue to appear on Epstein's flight records without consequence, as the Kardashian coven continues to poison young women, as Elon's rockets fail eternally to make it back to the moon and Steve Schwarzman burns children with acid by moonlight, I am glad the polis, or poleis, of Los Angeles has at least one real hero, Evan Funke.
America is going to need a powerful new prince to stand up to the mafia, or a prince of the people in every polis to get people to stop participating in their crimes. The latter seems more American to me, and is a more permanent victory. If your polis does not have such a prince, it could be you.
There is no such thing as no nobility, as no folklore. People will always find others to look up to and imitate. Life would be better if we honored the humble hardworking providers close to home instead of the images of corrupt wealth and power far away. If you have the courage to thanklessly start a farm or restaurant, I would like to say thank you, even if I never meet you.
And Evan if you are reading this, thank you for the inspiration. Thank you for the pasta.