“Fresh pasta at most restaurants are priced from $17 and up, so I thought: why can’t it be affordable?” says Shawn Kishore, 32, the brains behind the group. So, the restaurant consultant-turned-restaurateur set out to create a mass-market concept — and keeps the prices down by using good-quality, but locally-sourced ingredients. Prices for the pasta dishes start from $8 for a plain plate of pasta with house-made marinara sauce, and go up to $22 for a vegetarian option.

“You don’t need water from the French alps or some super fancy flour from Italy to give you a good product,” says Shawn. “You just need attention and care.” At Pasta Supremo, common-place ingredients like wheat flour, semolina, water and eggs are used to form a dry, crumbly dough. This is then passed through a noodle extruder to be compacted and pressed into long strands, short macaroni-like tubes and medium-length curly ribbons. The pasta is then allowed to rest overnight to allow for better elasticity.

The pastas are also coloured: yellow with egg yolk, black with activated charcoal, blue with butterfly pea flower extract. When we visited prior to the official opening, the team was also in the midst of fine-tuning a green spinach pasta and a red beetroot variation, which they plan to offer to customers soon. The taste difference is not very distinct, and Shawn shares that the colour variations have been created to for visual appeal: “Food today needs to be Instagrammable!”

While fresh pasta is the basic building block of the food at Pasta Supremo, Asian flavour is their main influence. “I am not Italian, none of my chefs are, so why try to make Italian-style food?” says Shawn. “However, pasta as a base is easy to work with because almost every food culture has its own noodles. So, we make fresh pasta relatable to the masses by incorporating familiar Asian flavours.” So together with the group’s executive chef Dannel Krishnan (who once worked as a cook at Bacchanalia and pastry chef at Saint Pierre) they came up with an unusual pasta menu featuring Asian ingredients like water chestnut, lup cheong and Thai basil.

Customise your pasta dish ($8 – $2) by choosing your pasta type, sauce, protein (or rather, a main topping, for mushrooms and corn also fall under the category) and garnishes like sprinklings of furikake or shavings of parmesan. Or save yourself the trouble and pick from their a la carte menu of four set pastas, two specials (soup of the day, pasta of the week), eight side dishes and two sweets.

The 18-month-long pop-up eatery at Suntec Convention Centre (which takes over the space that was once occupied by Ergon Greek Deli) is a hip, happy 80-seater with a cheery pink feature wall, wooden communal tables and an open kitchen where one can spy on the chefs at work. This is a counter-service restaurant: place your orders at their counter and your food will be served at the table.

You know Shawn is really dedicated to building this concept restaurant because he has tasted every single item on the menu, multiple times — event though he is severely allergic to gluten. The story goes that Shawn’s mum whipped up a chilli crab dish for his 21^st birthday celebrations and he scarfed down a load of mantou with it. He then proceeded to itch and swell everywhere and was sent to the hospital. “I just carry antihistamine pills with me all the time now,” says Shawn. “But I wish the condition didn’t develop so late in my life, after I had already known the taste of all these things that I now cannot eat, yet crave for!”

This chicken skin appetiser is first boiled, dehydrated and then fried to a delicious crisp. A sweet and salty flavour hits you first. Meanwhile, the fennel and cumin in the mix are rather muted, and the heat from the Sichuan peppercorns comes only as a whisper. While we really wished for the flavours to be more complex and for the heat to be amped up, we ended up finishing the rather generous portion anyway.

Good as a healthy-ish snack is a range of open-faced ciabatta sandwiches, also available as a coffee set at $6 during teatime. While the house-made bak kwa jam sounded promising, it was a bit too salty during our visit — Shawn, who also tasted it with us, shares that it usually isn’t as salty. Much more pleasant was the ciabatta topped with smashed avocado, feta, mint and a spritz of lime juice.

Thin slices of seared Australian wagyu short plate (a belly cut just under the ribs) is served with shaved raw onions, pickled ginger, fried shallots and drizzled with sesame ponzu. The tangy combination proves absolutely appetising. The sharped-eyed will also notice that the slices are of different thickness: the fatty pieces thinner and the lean meat pieces thicker. “We first did the dish with short plate cubes, but found the cut too fatty,” says Shawn. “This way, you can get a good balance of fatty and meaty parts with every mouthful!”

This is probably the most “Italian” pasta dish on the menu. The tomato base is made with rendered pork belly fat, onion, basil, oregano, diced and pureed tomatoes and simmered for 10 hours. The hulking pork-and-beef meatball that sits atop the long pasta has a 70-to-30 meat-to-fat ratio, and is pretty succulent. Bite into it and you will find the taste rather reminiscent of shui jiao (Chinese prawn and pork dumpling) filling — bits of water chestnut lend a refreshing bite to the meatball, and there is also a hint of five spice powder in there. The charcoal spaghetti has a nice density and chew, but could have been just a bit more al dente. The dish is topped with freshly-grated 24-month aged Parmigiano Reggiano that lends a nutty, salty lift to the flavours. 

This tastes almost as good as it looks. Chewy butterfly pea curly pasta akin to fusilli (once again, better if it were just a bit more al dente) is tossed in house-made chilli oil made by cooking onions, garlic and Sichuan green peppercorns in a confit over four hours at 85 degrees Celsius. “We basically took the essence of a ma la xiang guo and put it into the dish,” says Shawn. A sprinkling of tobiko (flying fish roe) adds delicate, briny pops to each mouthful, while a handful of chopped lap cheong and yun cheong (dried Chinese duck liver sausage marinated with rose wine) further adds a sweet umami kick to the dish. In fact, we’d be happy to have this pasta without the tiger prawns, which were meaty but not particularly flavoursome — just give us more of that tasty lap cheong crumble!

This one is for people with very specific tastes. Choose your pasta type, sauce, protein (or rather, a main topping, for mushrooms and corn also fall under the category) and toppings like sprinklings of furikake or shavings of Parmesan, and there you go: a dish to call your own. A winning combination we had was with curly pasta in a fragrant Asian pesto made with Thai basil, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaf, old ginger and candlenut. Topped with crispy garlic, plus sweet and savoury burnt miso corn kernels, it made for a very moreish vegetarian option. A shower of Parmigiano Reggiano further lent a savoury edge to the combination. One should note that the price of this plate comes up to over $24 — higher than any item on the menu. Bespoke meals come at a price, even at affordable joints!

One of two desserts on the menu. A pot of finely textured pistachio crème topped with house-made pistachio brittle, this dessert might sound plain but is one worth saving your appetite for. “We wanted to call it panna cotta but it isn’t really one,” says Shawn, and we are so glad that it isn’t. The not-too-sweet custard with just a little bit of gelatin in it spreads on the tongue like silk and we couldn’t get enough of it.

The not quite al dente enough texture of the fresh pasta here isn’t like what you'd get at a true blue Italian restaurant — but its prices are more affordable, especially for made-from-scratch stuff. Moreover, the eatery has just opened, so give the kitchen team time to get their cooking consistency right. That said, the friendly vibe, fun flavours and yummy side dishes also make it a worthwhile place to check out if you’re in the area. 

Pasta Supremo is at 3 Temasek Boulevard #01-365/344/373/374 Suntec City Mall S038983. No reservations taken. Open daily 9am to 9pm. Last orders at 8.30pm. www.pastasupremo.co 

Photos: Ealbert Ho