A tasty spin on the cheese wheel of fortune.

In 2020 I wrote the first post in the “Strange bucket list items” series, which was intended to be a series of fun, quirky experiences. However, it is starting to feel like I should simply rename it into “Cheese bucket list items”, because much like the first, the second entry now is also going to be about cheese (and probably the third one as well, because who am I kidding?).

I do not know if you are familiar with the concept of the cheese wheel pasta (sometimes also known as pasta alla ruota), but you essentially take a giant hollowed out cheese wheel and pour freshly cooked, hot pasta with a sauce of your choice into it. The scraped cheese inside the wheel melts while the pasta is being mixed in it and the result is a delicious melted cheesy goodness. The visual experience makes for half of the attraction, as cheese wheel pasta is supposed to be prepared in front of you and some restaurants even set the cheese on fire to melt it.

The first time I found out about the cheese wheel pasta was in Australia, when I saw a Facebook ad for a new restaurant opening in Sydney in 2017. Of course that happened just as I was leaving, and the same thing happened again and again – another restaurant opened in the UK just as I moved out of Leeds where I lived for 6 months, and the restaurant in Stockholm was closed when I was there. I also forgot about it in between the advertising reminders, so it wasn’t until 2023, when my partner and I decided to visit Vienna, Austria for my birthday and I casually checked whether they have any cheese wheels anywhere, that I finally got my first cheese wheel pasta experience.

We went to restaurant 8o8 and the pasta they served from the cheese wheel was truffle tagliatelle. They did not set it on fire, but it was delicious, the price wasn’t outrageously high and it was great fun watching the waiters wheel around giant cheese wheels on the tray tables all night. An all around great first experience, so I am already looking forward to the next one, preferably in the original pasta land – Italy.