Sacchettoni — little stuffed pasta purses tied at the top like tiny gift bags — is a fresh-pasta dish that exposes every weakness in a chef's pasta game. The dough has to roll thin enough to read a newspaper through. The filling has to be dry enough not to wet the wrapper. The seal has to be tight or the bags burst in the boil.
Brian Lewis runs OKO in Rye, New York, and The Cottage in Westport, Connecticut — two suburban tasting-menu rooms that have been on the Connecticut fine-dining radar for years. He came to Bobby's kitchen in 2019 with sacchettoni, which is a chef's chef move: a dish almost no home cook has heard of, and one that punishes the imprecise.
Bobby grills. He has not, by his own broadcast admission, rolled a lot of fresh pasta. Lewis rolled his. The judges noted.