Move over, bucatini. Caramelle, mafaldine, and other hot pasta shapes to look for in 2025
The pasta shapes emerging on the scene in the new year.
My New Year’s resolution is the one I make every year: to try as many new shapes of pasta as possible. Like my own personal carb-based Pokémon, I wish to collect them all. It’ll be tricky to top 2024. Thanks to scouting for the 76, I ate a lot of pasta.
We’re talking everything from standard issue spaghetti to esoteric shapes like candele and corzetti. In the course of selecting the most vital restaurants in Philadelphia, I ate at 43 restaurants in the course of six weeks, and the majority of those were Italian.
In this intensive study of Philly’s Italian scene, some micro-trends emerged. Meatball size is generously above the standard golf ball. Tiramisu remains extremely popular. Philadelphia is a hotbed of pasta shape innovation, and as I scouted, I noticed that some shapes are on the rise. Thus I present: the hot girl pasta shapes of 2025.
What’s a hot girl pasta shape? Think back to 2020, those blurry pandemic days of sourdough starters, PCP shortages, and bizarre food shortages. Perhaps you remember our friend bucatini, a thick spaghetti-like noodle with a hole in the middle, like a skinny, long ziti. Bucatini was the established hot girl pasta shape from roughly 2018 until 2022, thanks in part to the devotion of cookbook author and food personality Alison Roman, and a cacio e pepe renaissance. It was so popular that when an FDA hold left the US market bare of the noodles in 2020, New York Magazine launched an investigation.
Don’t worry, bucatini is still on the scene, but in my estimation, the long pasta shape that is supplanting it on menus is mafaldine. It’s a noodle that’s flat in the middle and ruffly on the edges, sort of like a supersized stretched-out lasagna sheet, and therefore excellent for twirling and collecting sauce—the nooks of the ruffles gather delicious little bits particularly well.
The mafaldine alla vodka with Chesapeake jump lump crab at Wilder is a great example of how nicely the shape soaks up sauce. There’s a gorgeous mafaldine in pesto with burrata at Ambrosia Restaurant too, which I ate at the peak of basil season. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this extruded beauty in the new year.
In Philly’s pasta scene, the noodles are constantly changing and evolving to match the sauce, so some shapes are seasonal. One that has had surprising staying power is the caramelle, a stuffed pasta that looks like a Jolly Rancher, if a Jolly Rancher was opaque and savory. Fiorella has had one on their menu with rotating fillings the past two times I’ve visited; in November they had a caramelle stuffed with chicken liver cooked down with sage and apple. Over the summer, Osteria made a gorgeous caramelle stuffed with tomato, caramelized onion, and 24 month old Parmigiano Reggiano.
It’s fun, it’s got potential, and I bet we’ll see more chefs embracing the sweet possibilities soon.
Honorable mention in the hot pasta shape category goes to culurgiones, the finicky Sardinian dumpling-like pasta that I first had at Elizabeth Grothe’s Feast of the Seven Pastas, and has since made the transition to the menu at her new Queen Village spot Scampi. It even got a shout-out from Bon Appetit. When I visited Bastia, chef Tyler Akin was playing with a sweet potato version of culurgiones bathed in brown butter and sage that I still think about, and Vetri had a version on the menu last spring.
It’s the play on ravioli that we’re all looking forward to. My guess is that more interesting stuffed pastas will emerge as Philly’s Italian scene thrives.