Tips for perfecting pasta at home

Tim Siadatan chats to Lauren Taylor about his best advice for homecooks

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Digging into an unctuous 16-hour beef shin ragu wrapped around fat pappardelle pasta, it's obvious why this is one of Padella's signature dishes.

A handful of chefs work busily in the open kitchen of the pasta restaurant's original London establishment (there's now two), chopping girolles, flipping pastas in a pan and grating mountains of Parmesan on every dish at the pass. And the beef shin ragu is flying out.

"It's really, really, really good, it's hard to explain to English people how good," says my waiter Francesco (and he's Italian). The pici cacio e pepe is their other most popular choice, he shares.