Black with squid ink, crusted with cheese, oozing sauce and stuffed with honey-glazed octopus arms that curl out from the edge, the pupusadilla from Que Pasta looks like it landed from another planet.
In fact, it’s the product of a few different worlds melded together by a young New Orleans chef who moves between them and who has found a home base in New Orleans bars.
Chef Amanda Alard started Que Pasta as a Latin fusion pop-up and has built the concept as a personalized expression of culture and flavor. Photographed at Barrel Proof on April 8, 2021. (Photo by Brett Duke, NOLA.com and The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Que Pasta is a Latin fusion concept that Amanda Alard created in 2018, back when she was cooking at Carrollton Market, the now-closed Riverbend bistro. By 2019, she took over the kitchen at the Mid-City bar 12 Mile Limit, working collaboratively with the bar as a permanent pop-up. Last year she expanded into the kitchen at Barrel Proof, a bar in the Lower Garden District where Que Pasta service menus four days a week.
Her pupusadilla combines the toasty corn cake texture of pupusas with the form and scale of a quesadilla. It’s also a handy, one-dish synopsis of the style Alard has developed.
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Que Pasta started as a way to explore her own heritage, between the influences of her Cuban father and Honduran mother, while folding in her own interest in global flavors. It has grown into something that feels entirely its own, a highly personal cuisine that could also be the personification of its creator.
Heavily inked with tattoos, Alard considers squid ink a foundational ingredient in her kitchen.
She frequently references her own “Napoleonic” stature of just over 5-foot-something while making dishes that reach far above the bar for tavern fare.
She often feels like an outsider — as a transplant to New Orleans from her native Miami, as the only Latin American woman in many of the spaces she occupies — yet her food shows people exactly who she is. Her motto for Que Pasta is: "What being a black sheep tastes like."
“You look at me, you look at the dish, and it makes sense,” Alard said.
Que Pasta creator Amanda Alard, right, works with Paola Guevara, left, in the kitchen at Barrel Proof, one of the bars serving her Latin fusion cuisine, on April 8, 2021. (Photo by Brett Duke, NOLA.com and The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Que Pasta menus change frequently, and they differ significantly from one location to the other. Alard maintains different menus because it doubles the dishes her small six-person operation can field at any one time, giving them two canvases to work simultaneously.
One recent visit to 12 Mile Limit brought squid ink tortellini topped with shrimp and planted over a creamy green pea puree with black bean garlic sauce and dashes of bracing habanero chimichurri.
Flounder ceviche in ginger-spiked coconut milk in a squid ink sope, part of the menu at Que Pasta, on April 8, 2021. (Photo by Brett Duke, NOLA.com and The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
At Barrel Proof last week, there was a flounder ceviche awash in ginger-spiked coconut milk, served in a sope, a cup-shaped fried masa cake made with squid ink and gleaming black like lava rock.
One recurring standard is ropa vieja pappardelle, twinning the classic Cuban braised beef with the delicate, sauce-catching noodles. A piccadillo lasagna special just kept giving one layer of flavor after the next, between the finely ground pork and beef, olives, strips of poblano, stretchy queso and soft ricotta.
This is all still bar food, though, hearty drinking food, with heat and heft and value.
Que Pasta’s wings are tossed with a mellow-sweet guava hot sauce, and the menus often have straight-up tacos too, built on tortillas from another local pop-up and maker, Tacos Para La Vida.
Alard has evolved an aesthetic for Que Pasta that hits like artsy punk and campy horror (it’s more Rocky Horror than gory horror). She writes her menus in drippy letters over leopard print backgrounds. If this food had its own soundtrack, it would be played by the Cramps.
For all the creative energy pulsing here, Que Pasta starts with the most homey and universal of inspirations: Alard’s family cooking, the flavors of home, the food that she missed as she made her way through a new city.
The ropa vieja, the pupusas, the guava, and perhaps most of all the octopus are familiar ingredients from her mother's kitchen.
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In the Que Pasta kitchens, though, she is writing new pages into the script. Her dishes often start with a single ingredient and then angle off through different ideas.
“That's just the way my mind wants to work,” Alard said. “You start with one thing and think, well, can we add this? And this? And maybe even this? To me, it's just fun.”
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Bars have proven fertile soil for Que Pasta to grow, even as they’ve been run through a gauntlet of restrictions and disruptions in the pandemic. It’s been about shared resources, mutual support, creative collaboration and just hanging on.
Through it all, Que Pasta has been a vivid example of how the modern New Orleans neighborhood bar can make new ideas and different voices as accessible as the next round.
Alard is also expanding again. On Saturdays, Que Pasta runs a grill at Parisite, the skatepark under the Interstate 610 overpass at Paris Avenue, cooking pupusas and chicharrons and other street food. This Saturday marks the first in a series of fundraisers at Parisite called Havana Nights, from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., where Que Pasta food sales will help raise money for families in need in Cuba.
Find Que Pasta at
12 Mile Limit, 500 S. Telemachus St., (504) 488-8114, dinner Friday to Saturday, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., brunch Sunday 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Barrel Proof, 1201 Magazine St., dinner from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. Tuesday to Friday (a different pop-up, Matchbook Kitchen, cooks here Sat.-Mon.)
Parisite Skatepark, 1606 Pleasure St., Saturday, 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.
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