If your idea of cooking is DoorDash and a prayer, this is your sign to level up with actual fresh pasta, an Italian chef and bottomless prosecco in the Burbank hills.
For one night only, The Green Room at Castaway becomes a tiny corner of Puglia, the sun-soaked heel of Italy that basically invented “I woke up like this” carb glamour. Italian chef Roberta D’Elia is flying in with Pasta Evangelists to teach you how to make the region’s most iconic shapes by hand: cavatelli and orecchiette, the little shells that exist solely to hold as much sauce as physically possible.
Rest assured, this isn’t some untested pop-up. Pasta Evangelists’ masterclass is ranked as TripAdvisor’s number one food experience in London, which means this format has already been stress tested by very opinionated people who take their carbs seriously (which we know because Time Out was born in London). Now it’s getting the L.A. treatment for a single night, in a space that already feels like you’ve snuck into a fancy wrap party.
Forget the usual watch-from-the-back demo where someone in a toque does all the work while you politely clap. You’re at the table, hands in the flour, rolling and shaping your own pasta while Roberta tells stories about cucina povera, the “poor man’s kitchen” tradition that somehow gave us some of the best food on Earth. There will be zero written exams, but a lot of “oh, so that’s what my Nonna was talking about” moments, even if your actual grandma is from Glendale.
Fueling all this? Bottomless prosecco and a very extra antipasti spread. Think of it as your pregame for carbs. You sip, you snack, you try to pretend your pasta doesn’t look like an abstract sculpture while Roberta gently rescues it and makes you feel like a culinary prodigy anyway.
When the dough settles, everyone sits down together to eat the pasta they just made, with twinkly L.A. lights spread out below like a movie backdrop. Up here, The Green Room feels like a secret hilltop cocktail lounge that decided to moonlight as the most scenic cooking class in the Valley. It’s part cooking class, part dinner party and part “adding ‘can make fresh orecchiette’ to my dating profile.” If you’re picturing a generic suburban cooking class in a strip mall, this is not that.
There are limited seats and it’s one night only, so think of this as a blink-and-you-missed-it event you’ll see all over Instagram the next day. It’s the difference between “we should do a cute cooking thing sometime” and actually getting flour on your hands and magnificent fresh pasta on your plate.
Chef's kiss! Mwah!