Pasta and pizza under S$30
These days, Italian food is a lot more accessible than it used to be in the early 2000s, but a fine meal can still set you back a hefty sum.
As far as Italian cuisine is concerned, we think La Casetta serves up pretty solid quality for the price, since its handmade pasta and pizzas are available for less than S$30!
The menu also doesn’t just cycle through the tried-and-true permutations — it offers some unconventional ideas, such as the zucca guanciale e burrata pizza (S$24).
Instead of the ubiquitous Neapolitan pizzas, which are puffy and chewy, La Casetta’s pizza dough leans towards the Roman-style, where the crust is thin and crunchy.
The dough is solid, but the ingredients — roasted pumpkin, fior di latte, guanciale, burrata, and sage — are what make this pizza shine.
The combination of fior di latte and burrata, accentuated by bursts of juicy and almost-pasty roasted pumpkin, results in each slice coming out delectably creamy.
Just as how four-cheese pizzas usually use honey as a contrast against the heavy cheeses, the roasted pumpkin basically plays the same role here — perhaps does so even better!
If this sounds a bit too rich and sweet for you, you can also opt for more classic pie options including the margherita classica (S$20) and quattro formaggi e tartufo (truffle four-cheese pizza, S$25).
As for the housemade fresh pasta, La Casetta’s menu offers quite a diverse range of sauces and pasta shapes.
These range from ravioli di ricotta alla vodka (spinach ravioli in vodka-tomato cream sauce, S$25) to cappelletti di vitello (with veal and foie gras, S$28).
Our choice of tagliolini neri al granchio (S$26) was pretty satisfying, too, with a bold but controlled briny profile and generous portions of fresh crab meat clinging to slender squid-ink tagliolini.
The tagliolini was cooked just a bit past al dente — the texture generally preferred by Singaporeans.
Dining and Cooking