Date Idea: Pasta Dates!

Let’s face it: food and dining count as possibly one of the best parts of a dating relationship. In the first few months of getting to know a possible life partner, you’d want to go out often, meet in restaurants, and try the best food.

Sure, pizza may be everyone’s favorite food, but unless it’s the kind cooked in truffle oil and topped with white truffle shavings, it may be too “informal” or casual for those date nights when the guy would really want to impress the girl.

And so, it may be down to the perfect balance of comfort food and a good formal dinner: the pasta dish and restaurant.

If you already have the skills to whip up a great dinner, and impress the date with your kitchen acumen, then go ahead and try your hand at these recipes:

• Jamie Oliver’s Top Pasta Recipes
• Cooking Light’s 25 Best Pasta Recipes
• Cooking Channel’s Top Italian-Style Pasta Recipes

However, if you’re like the most of us who need cooking classes to get through boiled eggs, a trip to a good, even great, restaurant is a must.

Here are five reasons why you have to choose a pasta date in your first months of dating:

• Authentic Italian restaurants in the US have great handmade pasta. The drama of watching your favorite Italian restaurant prepare the dish as well as seeing that they’re handmade are not just charming; these may even give you plus points with your date.
• Pasta is not just a great comfort food; it’s also associated with good formal dates. Let’s face it: men aren’t as adventurous with food as women are in general. Most guys would be happy to dig in to a good, medium rare steak rather than tuck into a strange fusion dish. Pasta, however, is very universal. Whether it’s a feel-good trip to a good Italian diner or the whole comprehensive Italian fine dining experience, a pasta meal makes for great dates.
• Pasta pairs with good wine. Whether it’s a crisp and light white wine, a rich glass of finely-aged red wine, or even a decent glass of champagne, pasta goes well with good drinks. So if you want to wine and dine your date, pasta will definitely go well with it.

This pasta food crawl by the BuzzFeed Worth It Guys shows you a good range of pasta diners and restaurants across L.A. If you’re in the area, then it would be worth your time (and money) to try and visit these places. If you’re reading this, are engaged and are planning a trip to California (or probably a cross-country road trip), then it would be good to note these places and try them as well.

Here’s how you can recreate the Worth It Guys’ pasta crawl across L.A. in your area:

• Identify the great pasta joints in your city.
• Classify the pasta joints from “good,” “down-home,” and “feel-good” pasta, and up to the elaborate fine dining experiences.
• Read up on the reviews for some of the restaurants that interest you. Take note of the bad reviews, and weigh if these are deal-breakers, or if you’d still like to give the restaurants a try in spite of the bad feedback.
• Choose around five to ten of these restaurants to add to your “must-go-to” places throughout the course of three to six months.
• Plan out your dates from the list, and enjoy your pasta crawl!

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should skip the sushi, the steak, and the burger dates. By all means, you should even go on coffee dates and just park dates! It’s great to plan out certain dates and peg them as “pasta dates,” so that when you guys run out of ideas, places to go, and other similar hiccups, you’ll have a fallback plan to set your dates in either feel-good pasta places or the really upscale frou-frou pasta restaurants.

Dating is a matter of keeping the connection going. Some couples get into a rut where they get bored and then associate the boredom with the possibility that there’s just no chemistry there. Well, maybe that could be true for some cases, but sometimes the boredom could be tied to the fact that the dating couple has run out of things to do and places to go.

So don’t run out of date ideas. Plan out a pasta date once a month or every other month, and vary the venues and the types of dates you go to. If you plan on seeing each other weekly, you can go to a carousel ride on week, a coffee date the other, just hang out on the park on the next, and a pasta date to cap the month. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dining out to a family Italian restaurant, or take your date on a highlight with a resto similar to Le Petit Paris. The point is to set your dates in interesting venues, and watch the relationship blossom.