Alex Guarnaschelli’s Easy '80s Pasta Dish Still Holds Up

If you’ve ever watched chef Alex Guarnaschelli cook on one of her many Food Network shows—including “The Kitchen,” "Beat Bobby Flay," and, her newest endeavor, “Alex vs. America”—then you know just how talented she is. She can whip up a baked Alaska one week and fried chicken the next, and it’ll almost always be close to, if not exactly, perfect.

While she can—and usually does—wear many different hats, her cooking tends to go back to her roots. And, we’re not talking about her French training, but even further than that: her Italian heritage. 

Guarnaschelli is a proud Italian-American New Yorker, and her new cookbook, "Italian American Forever," highlights that.

Alex Guarnaschelli Releases New Cookbook

In her fifth cookbook, Guarnaschelli focuses on the classic, delicious Italian food that she grew up eating.

“This book is an exploration of my heritage and, strangely, dishes I have rarely, if ever, cooked in a restaurant. They are dishes we make again and again to perfect them. They are dishes we eat again and again because we crave them endlessly,” she writes in the introduction.

The cookbook, which is available on Oct. 15, contains recipes for every occasion, from her Feast of the Seven Fishes menu on Christmas Eve to her dad’s and grandma’s homemade marinara sauces that work with almost any pasta shape or as a base for multiple other recipes in the book.

While she offers her recipes for more than 10 classic pasta dishes, like Bolognese and Baked Ziti, we know Guarnaschelli loves a pasta dish that’s simple and easy to make with few ingredients. It’s why she whips up a 15-minute, five-ingredient pasta when she doesn’t feel like cooking. So, we were immediately drawn to her retro “1980s Date-Night” pasta that features quick-cooking angel hair noodles.

“In the 1980s, angel hair pasta with tomatoes was the it date dish, and if you were running a restaurant, you had to have it on your menu. I ate almost exactly this dish a few times in college when on a date with my crush. The servers moved around the dining room on roller skates (all night in roller skates!) and the pasta was always served in a dark blue bowl with a confetti pastel pattern on the edges,” Guarnaschelli writes. “The taste? Tomatoes with hints of cream and basil and the glorious texture of the pasta. No cheese. Just nostalgia.”

The “date night” dish is made with angel hair pasta, garlic, tomato paste, white wine, heavy cream, fresh tomatoes, and basil. It comes together, with a homemade sauce, in about 20 minutes, making it the ultimate weeknight meal—whether it’s date night or not.

Much like high-waisted jeans, "Ghostbusters," and the Bisquick back-of-the-box recipe, it's time to bring this '80s classic back. Here's how to make the tasty dish at home.

How to Make Alex Guarnaschelli's 1980s Date-Night Angel Hair Pasta

Servings: 4-6 people

Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 3 large garlic cloves, grated
• 1/4 cup dry white wine
• Kosher salt
• 1/3 cup tomato paste
• 1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 pound angel hair pasta
• 3 sprigs fresh basil, stemmed

Instructions:

1. Make the sauce: In a large skillet, warm the olive oil and garlic over medium heat. Add the white wine and a pinch of salt. Simmer until the liquid cooks out and the garlic becomes tender, 3 to 5 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste with 2 tablespoons water and cook, stirring, to “fry” the paste for a minute in the oil. Add the cherry tomatoes and cook until they soften, 1 to 2 minutes. Add the cream and stir to mix. Season with salt to taste. Keep warm over low heat.
2. Cook the pasta: In a large pot, bring 4 quarts of water to a rolling boil. Add a generous handful of salt; the pasta water should taste like seawater. Add the pasta and stir with a slotted spoon to make sure it does not clump or stick to the bottom. Cook until al dente, 3 to 4 minutes. Reserve 1/2 cup of the pasta water, then drain the pasta in a large colander.
3. Combine the pasta and sauce: Add the hot pasta right from the colander to the skillet and toss to coat with the sauce. Shut off the heat and allow the pasta to rest for 5 to 8 minutes so the pasta absorbs the sauce. If the sauce is too thin, gently warm the pasta over low heat for 1 minute; if it is too thick, simply thin it out with some of the reserved pasta cooking liquid. Tear and add the basil.
4. Serve: Twirl a portion of the pasta on a serving fork and gently slip it off onto the center of a plate so it’s like a little pasta hill. Roller skates optional

Reprinted with permission from "Italian American Forever: Classic Recipes for Everything You Want to Eat: A Cookbook" by Alex Guarnaschelli. Copyright © 2024 by Alexandra Guarnaschelli. Photographs copyright © 2024 by Johnny Miller. Published by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.