Why this chef serves up noodle soup every Thanksgiving

DIEGO ARGOTI WHIPS UP SOME OF THE CITY'S MOST CREATIVE, T-DAY-INSPIRED RAMEN FOR THOSE IN NEED.

- BY STEPHANIE BREIJO

ESTRANO chef Diego Argoti, top, prepared ramen in the kitchen of Skyduster Beer's Silver Lake brewery last year.

Photographs by STEPHANIE BREIJO Los Angeles Times

Diego Argoti’s pasta popups are elusive. The irreverent, genre-bending chef typically announces his pasta events with suggestive fliers only a day or two in advance, haunts L.A.’s alleyways and parking lots late into the evening, and then vanishes again.

But not on Thanksgiving.

Without fail, the former Poltergeist chef can be found on Thanksgiving Day handing out free bowls of leftovers-inspired noodle soups piled with mashed potatoes, turkey and X.O.-laced cranberry sauce. It’s his way of giving back to the city, and providing for anyone who needs somewhere to go for a warm meal—and of giving himself a new appreciation for the holiday.

Argoti preferred to spend Thanksgiving in the kitchen long before he was cooking up bowls of altruism, though it was to avoid the day, not celebrate it.

“It was a very sad time,” he said. “All I cared about was working and partying.”

But in 2017 he was invited to a fellow chef’s house, where he and other cooks prepared the most extravagant meal imaginable: turducken roulade, pumpkin stuffed with mac and cheese, a green bean casserole topped with croissant dough, turkey gravy with gizzards and hearts drizzled over hachiya persimmons. It was Argoti’s signal that he can, and should, get real weird with it.