Is This the Pasta of the ‘90s?

In November, a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal announced it had gained cachet. Last month, Cook’s magazine called it “The Pasta of the ‘90s.”

This isn’t some boutique farmer’s neat new invention. This is rice--you’ve heard of it. Most of the world has been hip to it for some time. In China, the Rice Measure symbolizes justice, mercy and virtue. In Hong Kong, social workers ferret out welfare cheats by snooping in applicants’ rice bins to check the quality of rice stocked. And in Los Angeles, risotto is showing up in all the best places.

But is rice really the pasta of the ‘90s?

“No way,” Valentino’s Piero Selvaggio says. “Rice is one-dimensional while pasta is multi-multi dimensional.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” says Celestino Drago, owner/chef of Beverly Hills’ Celestino. “I don’t think that rice can ever be as popular as pasta in America.”

“Absolutely not,” Mauro Vincente of Rex and Pazzia declares. “It’s more popular, yes, but nothing can replace pasta.”

You can’t blame Italians for being defensive about pasta. If F.T. Marinetti had his way in Italy before World War II, rice would have been the pasta of the ‘30s . His “Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine” denounced pasta--and especially macaroni--as an oppressive political element responsible for, among other things, weakness, pessimism, inactivity and fat-bellied conceit. The only solution Marinetti saw to this macaroni blight was a total ban on pasta--with rice as the sole starch substitute. Needless to say, Mussolini ignored his plan.

Even American-born chefs think pasta is irreplaceable. “We don’t have the same relationship to rice as we have to pasta,” says chef Evan Kleiman of Trattoria Angeli. “I mean, every kid in America eats spaghetti, right? It’s a fun thing to eat. Rice, on the other hand, has always been this badly treated, boiled gloppy thing that sat on the side of the plate.”

So what is it about rice? Well, where Rice-a-Roni was once the most exotic rice dish Americans--Southerners excluded--had been exposed to, interesting ethnic rice dishes are now common, at least in large cities. Kleiman admits to being hooked on the crusty Persian rice dish sometimes called chelo or chilau . And Toribio Prado, who always cooked at least one token pasta dish at Cha Cha Cha and Cafe Mambo, decided no pasta dishes were necessary on the rice-heavy menu at El Mocambo (see review above). What’s more, Cook’s magazine reports that American rice consumption has doubled since the late ‘70s.

And if you thought you were tired of oat bran stories, wait till rice bran fever hits. Once the stuff was used as cattle and pig feed, but last year preliminary experiments on test hamsters at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Albany, Calif., showed that defatted rice bran not only lowers cholesterol levels, it’s a double-strength cholesterol reducer--something like new improved double-strength Tide.