The Official Pasta Sauce Power Rankings
(Photo by Lucas Kwan Peterson / Los Angeles Times; Illustration by Martina Ibáñez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)
May 13, 2021 7 AM PT
Pasta Sauce Power Rankings. The general rules are:
I got jarred sauce (no cans), bought standard marinara or the closest approximation I could find (no vodka sauces, no puttanesca, etc.) and tried to include no more than one jar per brand. There are a lot of sauces here and, just as when looking at a list of Chumbawamba members, it can become overwhelming and difficult to tell them apart. You won’t really go wrong with, say, the top dozen or so sauces on this list.
Mothers of Reinvention
From the moment Honolulu shut down in early March 2020, restaurants and bars have valiantly swiveled to counteract the pandemic’s effects. We have had a dazzling choice of takeout (with spots such as Senia turning it into a high art), chef kits (Pai Honolulu had a creative series), and premium produce (MW Restaurant sold farmer friends’ goods). But some are reinventing the integral idea of what a restaurant is. Alejandro “Aker” Briceño, the former Nobu Honolulu pastry chef who was part of the pioneering eateries V Lounge (where he introduced the city to Neapolitan pies and Caputo flour) and Prima, returned to Honolulu in 2019 after five years with Nobu Malibu expressly to open a V Lounge 2.0 with then-partner Chris Kajioka. They were negotiating a lease when the pandemic hit. “It changed everything. Financially it didn’t make sense,” Briceño says.
Girl Scout Troop #6318, from left to right: Lucy Derman, Nea Lael-Wolf, Sylvia Reynolds, Keyra Schmidt, Ava Peña, Izabella Peña and Maizie Peebles. Copper Pot Cooking Studio celebrated its fifth anniversary in March with the installation of a little cookbook library and micropantry, custom-built for them by Girl Scout Troop #6318. Denise Perry, who owns the cooking studio on the corner of MacArthur and Laurel Avenue in Springfield, said that the project had been on her mind for some time. I ve always wanted a little cookbook library out in front of the shop, so I approached Alana Reynolds initially because of her work with Slow Food Springfield. Then the pandemic hit and all these micropantries started popping up it seemed like it d be a perfect opportunity to integrate the two together.