The Two Minute Review: Parmezza

Ronan Doyle
1 hour ago
2 min read

What should we know about Parmezza?

They’re cooking homemade pasta in a parmesan wheel! That’s certainly all we needed to know to get down to Liffey Street, where Parmezza’s slotted into the spot occupied until recently by Il Fornaio. The build-your-own-bowl pasta bar opened at the start of the month, with some snappy social content and sunny pride of place in the newly-pedestrianised wake of the Ha’penny Bridge drawing curious crowds. Though its influencer operator acting as if he’s not promoting his own place raises a major red flag... 'Digital Creator' Yasin Çayır has a sizeable Instagram and YouTube following, which he's clearly hoping will help shift plenty of pasta.

What’s on the menu?

Hand-rolled tagliatelle is the basic building block here – the gluten-free rigatoni that briefly appeared on the menu screen in their first days is now nowhere to be seen on printed menus. It’s tossed in the Insta-friendly cheese round before being ladled over with your choice of five sauces and eleven toppings, with optional crispy onion, truffle oil (bleurgh) or Parmesan to finish.

Any illusions we had about the “mini trip to Italy” Parmezza promises were quickly dispelled (and misspelled) with “arabiata” and “napoliten” among the options before us. Those typos are at least in the ballpark, which is more than we can say for the flavour. The Arrabbiata here only earns its “angry” name from how thoroughly grumpy the flat tomato stodge left us. Paired with soggy sauteed broccoli and flavour-free “jungle” (?) mushrooms it was nothing short of sordid.

A serious lack of seasoning is the one unifying trait, never clearer than in the pasta itself – there's little doubt that the mass vats they’re boiling it in hadn’t been properly salted. That the cheese wheel was down to the rind hardly helped, the tossing not so much rendering a glossy cheese sauce as shedding a few stray curds to cling to the underdone ribbons. Desperate for flavour, we grabbed the cheap shaker and gasped as its loose lid spilled out more salt than intended – on balance, it was still better.

Unable to face chewing through much more of that pasta, we doubled up on toppings to sample a fair variety – please note we would not recommend pairing pesto and ragu. Not that we’d recommend the pesto in general, plonked on top with its oily excess. Great pesto sauce comes from emulsifying it with salty, starchy water; this half-done job just made for a paltry puddle. The ragu is the kind of rock-solid reliable you might have rustled up at home - by this stage we were taking that as a win.

We took a tip from our server and tried pairing feta and sundried tomato with the cream cheese sauce – look, we’d long ago given up any efforts at Italian authenticity – and soon found ourselves, not for the first time that day, filled with regret. It was probably too much to ask for a quick casual pasta bar in this location to be something special, but we’ve have settled for solid. We dared to dream of Trastevere – we got a plain old travesty.