In the long aftermath of L.A.’s pandemic lockdowns, one of the city’s hottest new Italian restaurants is also one of its last shining outposts of truth, goodness, and beauty. Here, at Funke, pasta is the menu—no deconstructed, high-concept tour through oodles of noodles, but a richly endowed recourse to civilization’s fundamentals, grain and water, fertile soil, noble care. Finding no better place than in Chef’s hands to spend a last night in Los Angeles, the diner partakes of the kitchen’s measure of good life and great leadership.

In order to understand the division in the world today, you must understand the unification of Italy. To understand Italy, you must grasp pasta. And if you are unfortunate enough to live in Los Angeles, you fortunately have a hero to guide you, the Prince of Pasta, Evan Funke.

Evan just opened a new restaurant, his third, an ambitious endeavor in a historic Art Deco building. His previous two, Felix and Mother Wolf, were unquestionably huge hits in the competitive and complex dining scene of Los Angeles. His new project, a three-story pasta extravaganza complete with a rooftop bar, bears his name Funke.

There is a difference between a nobleman and a hero. Nobility are admired heroes and legends change our behavior. Theseus was more than a king, Orpheus more than a musician, and Evan Funke is more than a chef.

There is no courage in the absence of real danger. The people of Athens begged Theseus not to face the minotaur, for they believed it was certain death. And Evan was believed insane for opening a restaurant centered on expensive handmade pasta and focaccia perfectly soaking up meaty and creamy sauces surrounded by giant balls of burrata to a city of self-professed gluten-free vegans, who were more willing to daily imbibe a half-dozen pharmaceutical and recreational drugs than eat a slice of buttered toast.

Evan saw through their ruse, and he healed them of their hunger and psychiatric self-deception. Theseus knew how to defeat the minotaurs maze, and Evan saw right through the facade of the Instagram generation. They could not admit it, but deep down, he knew, carbs are king. And they always have been.

Grains like wheat berry, corn, barley, and rye seem eternal. They have no wild counterparts. They are commonly found at the most ancient of archaeological sites around the world. The Egyptians claimed wheat, like the alphabet, was a gift from the gods. Grains are also astonishingly productive. A single wheat berry turns into a hundred, a kernel of corn into a thousand, all in a few months. The whole grain is also uncannily ideal for nutrition, mapping almost perfectly to the needs of humans. It can be eaten whole or milled and baked in a seemingly endless variety of ways.

And yet, the modern world, soaked in a stale, weak vinaigrette of anti-traditionalism, has not only turned against religion, monarchy, and nobility, it has beheaded bread. Mammon, the god of money, hates bread for the same reason kings have always loved it: it brings abundance. Mammon and his private equity acolytes profit off private prisons while shutting down beloved restaurants. They feed on fear and scarcity. Bread is worth little money, we are told, pasta even less.

Better then to tune in eternally to a computer screen, to live and work in the mines of the symbol analyzers, the button pushers, and image worshippers, believing working with nature is beneath us. But now the tech workers are being laid off by the legion. And the AI is poised to obsolesce even this sad existence.

What has this revolution brought us? Health and prosperity? America is a dumpster fire. Even the restaurants have big bright screens to distract us from this fact as if we cannot spend a moment away from our beloved mass media despot, Tyrant Television. But the food is unfit for a compost heap. Amid terror and strife, it is understandable that people will look to the past for answers. And the road of Western culture leads directly back to Rome, to what we now call Italy.

The Machiavellians

Chef Evan Funke sniffs the scotch at Haute Living Celebrates Chef Evan Funke With The Macallan on April 18, 2024 in Beverly Hills, California. Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty

There is no such thing as Italy. This Mediterranean peninsula has no less than 20 distinct historical, cultural, and culinary regions. Each has seemingly similar but truly different takes on life. And by life, I mean bread, wine, meat, cheese, and fresh produce.

Italy was unified over a long and bloody period officially but debatably considered to have begun in 1848 and to have lasted until the end of World War I in 1918. Then, of course, came fascism, then another brutal war, then decades of globalization that the Italians largely consider to have undermined and exploited their economy, lives, and culture. Today there is a Microsoft campus in Milan.

This process was famously encouraged by Machiavelli, who saw the need for a prince to unify Italy and lead her into the coming modern world of powerful nation-states, not city-states.

Machiavelli's emphasis on the real, or practical, regime over the ideal state emphasized by Plato is considered the beginning of modern politics. However, it is worth noting that the state itself discussed by Plato was the Greek polis, the political community, the city, but not a city with multiple political communities, which is every modern city. Plato and all classical philosophers seemed to take for granted the supremacy of cities such as Athens, Jerusalem, or Rome over a nation-state, a concept that did not exist until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Maps before this period focused on cities and rivers. There were no borders.

The effect of unification on the once wealthy and glorious city of Naples, the inventors of lasagna, has been well exposited by Curtis Yarvin. Many accounts of travelers to Italy, in particular southern Italy soon after unification, reported on the sad state of the population, many of whom were emaciated or starving. Can you imagine? Some of the most fertile soil in the world, an abundance of fresh water, a climate so ideal that one can collect two complete harvests in a single year. And the people starved. Unification may have had benefits, but it did not benefit the pasta. However, Machiavelli eventually got his prince in the journalist dictator Benito Mussolini.

I'm no fascist, but Mussolini did at least one good thing for Italy. One of the reasons Italy is so nice today is Mussolini, thanks to his autocratic power, was finally able to kick out the mafia. Guess where they went, though. America. The mafia-run Bank of America, for example, is really the Bank of Italy.

Modern Italy is generally treated as three regions—North, known for Milan Central, dominated by Tuscany, and South, which includes the large island of Sicily. Evan began his quest in Bologna, a beautiful city in the Emilia-Romagna region of the North. This region also contains Parma, the origin of prosciutto di parma, and, of course, Parmigiano Reggiano, the king of cheeses. It was here Evan learned the ancient and sacred art of the sfoglino, of hand-rolled pasta. By now, he has graduated to the royal art, orecchiette.

If you have never made fresh pasta, I recommend it. Evan's book American Sfoglino is a great place to start. Like bread, pasta is simple to make but can take a lifetime to master. Unlike bread, however, pasta does not use yeast. It does not even use salt. For most pastas, the dough is only flour and water, though many pastas use eggs. Notably, the flour used in pasta comes from a different type of wheat than breads, cakes, and pastries: the durum berry. There are also delicious green spinach pastas in Italy and many other styles in Asia. If you are in New York, try Xian Famous Foods for some amazing Chinese hand-pulled noodles. Another incredible pasta restaurant in Los Angeles is Barrique, justifiably famous for their red beet pasta. Surely even more delicious pastas are waiting to be discovered.

Like bread, the difference between fresh and dried pasta can be immense, though dried pasta does last much longer than bread, and machine-rolled and extruded pasta can be made cheaply. Industrially produced spaghetti, macaroni, and ramen have fed countless budget-conscious eaters. However, seeing pasta existing only in this compromised state would be a mistake.

As the machines took over pasta production, the art of handmade pasta began to die out, only maintained in small pockets of Italy, China, and Japan. But Evan was not going to let the tradition die. Something drove him to do the insane, to laboriously and skillfully spend hours doing what we have long had machines do for us—make pasta.

Culinary Artistry

Evan Funke attends the Los Angeles season 2 premiere of HBO original series "The White Lotus" at Goya Studios on October 20, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. Jeff Kravitz/Getty

It was my last night in Los Angeles when I visited Funke. I had given ten years to this urban hell and watched it descend deeper, and I was moving out. Los Angeles is the desert where authenticity went to die a century ago. It's the coldest warm place on earth. Nowhere else do the health-obsessed look so sickly.

It would, however, be unfair to judge Los Angeles for something it isnt trying to be. Los Angeles is profoundly anti-traditional and deeply immoral. L.A. produces the lion's share of America's only remaining export: pornography. Hollywood executives have gotten away with being serial rapists for a hundred years. The streets overflow with drugs. Crime is rampant; the homeless advance on every front. L.A. is home to the most corrupt politician in California, Maxine Waters, which is like being the fattest kid at fat camp. Plato argued that the good city is based on virtue and civility, Los Angeles is what you get when these are not only ignored

but rebelled against.

Life in Los Angeles is Deleuze's dividual.

There is you. And there is the image of you. There is Los Angeles. And there is the image of Los Angeles. In Italy you are constantly seeing people and food. In Los Angeles you are always seeing images of people and images of food.

What you see in Los Angeles, in the rare moments a screen does not hypnotize you, is the back of the car in front of you, automobile ass, and asphalt. Images of giant angry women on billboards stare at you disapprovingly, threateningly. Many of them are holding guns. The buildings are dilapidated grey boxes. Homeless encampments are taking over. Malibu, L.A.’s nicest neighborhood has three liquor stores, two weed dispensaries, and no bakery. There is a single bakery in the sprawling mess of a city worth mentioning: Jyan Isaac. God bless you, Jyan.

The city is not without its aesthetic charms, as a visit to the Bungalow will still inform you, but it is, like everything else in the city, a trick. The beauties of Los Angeles are impossible to love. They are already in love with their iPhone, with their image of themselves.

Funke, located in the heart of Beverly Hills, was quite the scene. On the way in, expensive cars rumbled with aging Drake tracks. I sat next to two Chinese influencers who spent their entire multi-hour visit on their multiple iPhones, barely touching their food or speaking to each other, only taking pictures. Insecure-looking lawyers, bankers, and entertainers, regime stooges, flirted with age-inappropriate women.

Such is L.A. But the pieces that were under Evan's control were sublime. The real scene was a glass cube in the middle of the restaurant where we could watch the pasta being made. It was mesmerizing. The rest of the restaurant overflowed with beautiful marble, hand-blown light fixtures, and modern but tasteful art. Even the wine list was printed on fine paper a detail rarely paid attention to. How could one list fine Brunellos and Barbarescos on translucent Hammermill copy paper? But many do, or worse, assault us with hideous QR codes. The lovingly designed and printed menu also told the story and region of each hand-crafted pasta. Brilliant. Little stories like these breathe life into us in a world with more abstraction than context.

And then there was the staff. Service is the difference between a good restaurant and a great one. And the service at all of Evan’s restaurants has always been superb. The staff I interacted with were attentive, knowledgeable, and kind, which is impressive for such a large multi-story space.

But there's more. The staff all spoke about Evan in a particular way. They enjoyed working with him, and they admired him. Though the work was demanding, they relished the day-to-day and crucially, they felt part of something bigger. They were carrying and innovating on an important tradition. It also didnt hurt that the restaurants are all wildly popular. After the influencers departed, they were replaced by a lovely couple that had visited three times in the two weeks it had been open. Many nice restaurants get a single visit from a customer—only the finest command such repetition.

Of course, critiques could be levied. One of my favorite features of Italian restaurants is drinking glass bottles of water free of fluoride, which is illegal in Italy. They only had filtered tap, though it did come in sparkling. Limoncello, an essential companion to an authentic Italian meal, was absent from the drink list, though the bar did have it. The music was loud and stressful, though this is table stakes at an L.A. restaurant.

At Funke, Evan has begun to indulge in himself not as an image but as a symbol. The difference is subtle but crucial. The menus featured his distinct bearded silhouette; the staff wore pins with a stylized F. The check came with a complimentary postcard featuring his pasta tools. This did not strike me as vain. I found it regal.

Machiavelli famously stated it is better to be feared than loved. But this is taken out of context. Leadership is hard. If you have to choose, Machiavelli suggests choosing the former. But, he says, it is, of course, better still to be both respected and liked. Evan has achieved this. I thought of all the people I know who have worked for Elon Musk. They respected him yes, he is very creative, but they all hated him. Still, it would be better than working for global finance hero Steve Schwarzman, whose company PSSI was recently found using children to do hazardous slaughterhouse labor when they showed up to school, tired after working all night, with acid burns.

What a strange time for our heroes to be not farmers and hunters, athletes within nature, not musical men of art and enlightenment, but boys of business and sports, actors who do naught but imitate, creatives who do naught but desecrate. Our criterion for heroes is inverted. Surely a correction will come.

The Fall of The Golden Republic of California

Lawrence K. Ho/Getty

Far, far away from Musk and Schwarzman, Bologna is as close to the ideal city as I have ever seen. And Los Angeles is just as far away from it. Why, Evan, do you believe in us? Why not stay in paradise? Why pitch your tent among the sick and suffer to try to elevate us? Why would they listen now?

California has turned its back on bread. It has turned its back on natural law. It has turned its back on God. As sure as the waves crash in the ocean, this will lead to its downfall.

Now the Californians, poisoned in body and mind, are invading the rest of America. Can they or we afford to give up on California? Is it already time to abandon the union? Would we be better off if we cut it off, or must we heal it in order to heal ourselves? Do we even have a choice? The cartels that control the screens and, through them, people's minds are in California. It may not appear that we must feed and heal the sick in Beverly Hills to save Bozeman, but it may be the case. Perhaps this is a good thing. Surely people will be healthier when they leave a place where the food, water, and air are all poisoned and get off drugs. The justified fear, though, is they will bring the bad ideas and drugs to their new homes, which has been happening. Bozeman now sports a billboard at its entrance warning Californians to stay away.

Why Los Angeles, Evan? Doesn't Wally's across the street make a good enough pizza? Imagine what you could do for a Jackson, an Ojai, a Bozeman, a Chattanooga, or a Mobile? Or would that be compromising your favorite currency authenticity? Perhaps it is up to the local entrepreneurs to stand up to their usurer prince who sends their money abroad and do the unthinkable invest in a nice restaurant. How many places are there in your polis where you can get good food, with good service, at a reasonable price? Probably very few. But this is what everyone wants. Clearly, we do not live in a democracy.

But wait, Evan, isn't all this authenticity merely imported from Italy? It is not our own thus, by Plato's justice, every man having and doing what is his own is not just. With the closing of the Pacific Dining Car, Los Angeles now lacks a single nice American restaurant. Will Los Angeles, or America, ever be able to produce its authenticity again, or have we lost it forever to the grey goo of globalism? Do we have anything to be proud of other than sodomy? Is there anything to write about other than punditry?

With Hatchet Hall making waves in L.A. with cornbread, elk, and fried green tomatoes, there is hope for America. Chefs Brian Dunsmoor or Sean Brock will show you what cornbread can be, but that is only because Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills showed them what corn can be. These men are heroes. The food at Hatchet Hall is Southern, but at least the authenticity is imported from somewhere in America. Port cities must always, to some degree, collect their culture from the countryside.

Americans have loved cornbread since Iroquois times; we cannot let it die. But local flavors like cornbread and okra are under assault as the cartel-controlled Whole Foods moves into more neighborhoods, pushing California avocados and wine and starving the farmers who grow local traditions. Get behind me, Satan. We do not need global food. Italy imported tomatoes from America. They are American, not Italian. With its excellent climate, soil, abundance of rivers, and culture of dignity in craftsmanship, America was known for lucrative exports of fine food and clothing for many years. By 1775, the American colonies were exporting more than the entire rest of the British empire. Washington's vision was for America to be at once independent and the breadbasket of the world. Now, we import food and fertilizer from thousands of miles away, grow corn for the oil cartel, and enslave our aging farmers with usury and policy. We are setting ourselves up for the unthinkable: a famine.

If you read Machiavelli, be sure to realize that The Prince was not written to you. It was written to a tyrant. In fact, don't read The Prince. Read the far better Discourses on Livy. Machiavelli points out that people have a terrible habit of honoring those who have the potential to help them, and never do, over the people who actually help them. He saw men fawning over the rich and powerful and ignoring the man or wife who provided them their daily bread.

This is a deep sickness in America. The hypnotized agonize over images of lawyer politicians, sell their very souls to buddy up with billionaires, and hardly ever pay attention to or appreciate the person who grows their food or runs their favorite restaurant. They deserve your respect, not the mafia mercenaries on television. If you want to survive, if you want America to survive, know your farmer. Know and appreciate who provides your pasta. The closer to home you keep them, the better.

And yet, the modern world, soaked in a stale, weak vinaigrette of anti-traditionalism, has not only turned against religion, monarchy, and nobility, it has beheaded bread.

Like Gandhi, who came from a family of grocers, Evan sees the beauty and power of what is often seen as an outdated village industry. Gandhi loved spinning fabric, Evan loves rolling pasta. This is the road to freedom without violence. Gandhi was both respected and liked. I certainly respect that a man without a bank account became more powerful to his people than the King of England. Gandhi was a good Prince.

Also, like Gandhi, Evan is a man beyond sectarianism. Is he a traditionalist, calmly carrying the torch of tagliatelle, or is he an innovator, brashly putting Meyer lemons and pistachio on pizza? Is he a conservative, a law-abiding small businessman and leader, or a liberal, rolling pasta side by side with his employees, as if every man and woman were equal above the dough? Is he a founder, creator, and force of masculine strength, or is he tender, a provider, a man willing and eager to listen to his mostly female teachers?

One thing is certain, though. Evan Funke is a hero. Since Felix opened, more and more L.A. restaurants have changed their behavior. Handmade pasta, wood, or gas-fired pizza ovens are popping up everywhere. Bread and cheese are on the menu again. Evan has single-handedly saved us from the dark ages of anti-food, beverages, vegan cheese, gluten-free avocado toast, and vinaigrette-drizzled kale. It would have been better to starve. But thanks to Evan, we will have bread, and we will have it abundantly.

Between Strauss and Burnham, between Machiavelli and Plato, between Marx and Jesus runs an eternal golden thread of bucatini. Do we seek the ideal or the real? Do we seek heaven or earth? Do we seek the truth or accept what we are told? Do we seek money-making girlfriends or bread-baking wives? What we seek, we will find.

Most people are uninterested in philosophy or too busy for it. And that is why the restaurant is so important today. It is one of the only things Mammon has not turned into grey goo, though he and his price-obsessed followers are trying. The restaurant is, thankfully, a lousy business. This makes it a wonderful church. Chefs like Evan do not act out of greed. They are searching for something higher. They are the only priests left that people listen to. And they speak through food. This is important since, as Gandhi said, spiritual truth cannot be communicated with mere English.

The journalist dictators can rearrange the Roman letters as much as they want. They will never reach anyone like a lovingly baked bread loaf can. This is why the Symposium tradition was so crucial in Athens. It would get people in a state where they would actually listen to others and themselves. The dinner party is a powerful medium, and handmade pasta is a way to do it well without inviting Mammon. Almost anything else is a mere distraction. Dinners are the bread and butter of philosophers, nobility, and statesmen. Jefferson's Monticello went through over 1000 bottles of wine per year.

Pasta Politics

Lawrence K. Ho/Getty

If you are in Los Angeles, I encourage you to dine and imbibe your way through all of Evan’s restaurants. He will probably be there at one of them. Feeding the hungry, healing the sick, inspiring and caring for his workers, carrying on tradition, and breathing life into it.

As America dives headfirst into election propaganda clown world, I will be head down, binding books and making bread and pasta, the forgotten village industries that make life worth living. I don’t want to go to space anymore. I don’t want to change the world. I want to know who grows my wheat, and I want to be kind to them. The village is not the new city, it is the new nation.

I was once so busy changing the world from my computer screen I forgot how to work, forgot how to cook, how to live or to make live, how to grow. Theseus hunted his own game. Washington waxed poetic in his love for manure. Gandhi made his own clothing. Even the Pharaoh, the god-king of Egypt, would ritualistically put his hand to the plow. A life without sweat is no life at all.

George Washington, the Prince that unified America, was a farmer, which he saw as the noblest vocation. Mount Vernon grew 30 kinds of grain and had a mill, which operates to this day. Now that we live under a despotism of journalists, lawyers, and usurers, and nobody is in charge, it may be time to leave the collapsing port cities, return to the farm, and return to the river. As Spider Jerusalem says, every vote is a vote for television.

Some say the doors of tradition are closed, and we must invent a new way of life if our current one isn't working. Whatever the new synthesis is, we will need a different kind of Prince, a virtuous provider, not a television lawyer. And yet, Emerson believed the greatness of America was that every man could be the king of his home, and every woman a queen. That we wouldn't need princes at all.

As the politicians of Los Angeles weather one corruption scandal after another, as the American nobility continue to appear on Epstein's flight records without consequence, as the Kardashian coven continues to poison young women, as Elon's rockets fail eternally to make it back to the moon and Steve Schwarzman burns children with acid by moonlight, I am glad the polis, or poleis, of Los Angeles has at least one real hero, Evan Funke.

America is going to need a powerful new prince to stand up to the mafia or a prince of the people in every polis to get people to stop participating in their crimes. The latter seems more American to me, and is a more permanent victory. If your polis does not have such a prince, it could be you.

There is no such thing as no nobility, as no folklore. People will always find others to look up to and imitate. Life would be better if we honored the humble hardworking providers close to home instead of the images of corrupt wealth and power far away. If you have the courage to thanklessly start a farm or restaurant, I would like to say thank you, even if I never meet you.

And Evan if you are reading this, thank you for the inspiration. Thank you for the pasta.

Rob Rhinehart is a publisher, baker, poet, founder, and friend.