Meet Nadia Caterina Munno | The Pasta Queen

We had the good fortune of connecting with Nadia Caterina Munno and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Nadia, is your business focused on helping the community? If so, how?
As someone born in Italy who ate off the land, one of my biggest passions is to take part in the fight against fast food. You’ll never see me use anything processed in my recipes; when I reach for a can of tomatoes they are pure, just tomatoes and sea salt. Eating well and with your health as the focus doesn’t always need to mean traditional ‘diet food’. I truly believe that everything in life is good in moderation, especially if the ingredients you are using are pure and unadulterated.

With this philosophy in mind, I strive to teach my followers how to make delicious meals with only a handful of ingredients in a matter of minutes so they can skip the processed junk and enjoy a homecooked meal instead. As I mentioned earlier, health is everything, and when you use high-quality and in-season ingredients, your food will taste better and your body will look and feel better, too.

People like to label pasta as “unhealthy” but the reality is that when you use high-quality ingredients and support your local farmers, pasta is incredibly nutrient-dense and also very affordable.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
My art is the food I create and share with the world. To me, I am most passionate about my mood in the kitchen, the way I look and feel while cooking, and the way that the food is presented. I truly believe that if you are happy and carefree while cooking, that joy is going to carry through into the taste of the food. Similarly, when food is presented in a beautiful way, I think it’s more enjoyable to eat. The saying that we eat with our eyes first is so true; in fact, I think it goes one step further. I think digestion begins as soon as you set your eyes on your food; if it looks good, it will be easier to digest and everything will just flow much more naturally.

What I love most about what I am doing now, is that I am able to share this art with the world through social media. I am able to teach my community some really amazing skills but have fun, make it look gorgeous, and act a little silly in the process. To me, it’s all about creating a beautiful life, and being able to share that skill with the world.

The path I took to where I am today was not exactly linear. About 8 years ago I had a premonition that someday I would be doing exactly what I am doing now. I had just moved to London from Italy and it was my first time being in a different county. It’s funny, when you find yourself in a new place, you really start to discover and connect with your culture on a deeper level. When I am in Italy, I am just another Italian but in London, I was so different from everyone else and I really stood out. I started to notice that people were sort of fascinated by me and my background and I just knew that someday I would have a platform where I’d be able to share the beauty of Italian culture on a global scale.

Fast forward to March of 2020 and that dream started to take shape. I found myself, like the rest of the world, at home with a lot of downtime. I wasn’t able to go into the office like usual so I started to play around on TikTok where I was really just being myself. Within three to four months, my account started to go viral and I had amassed almost a million followers. Shortly after TikTok took off, I started my Instagram and I had the same rapid-fire success there. It felt so validating to bring so many people joy during a very hard time in history just by being myself and sharing my background in a very sincere way.

Now, that all sounds like a very easy road to success, but believe me, it wasn’t always as glamorous as it seems. I did try to enter the YouTube world around the same time I moved to London and I failed. At that time you had to shoot on an actual camera as the iPhones were not as sophisticated as they are now and posting videos involved hours and hours of editing. As the saying goes, the juice was not really worth the squeeze at the time and I started to think I’d never be able to make a career out of sharing my content. Thankfully, there was a voice inside of me that urged me to keep going and block out those negative thoughts (“Silencio, Bruno!” for all the Luca fans out there!).

My best advice for creatives looking for their big break is to remember that every single person on this earth has a niche, you just need to put yourself out there to find it. Out of the 7 billion people in the world, I guarantee there are people out there who want to consume the exact content you want to create from the heart. You have a fan base right now and you don’t even know about it! Don’t be afraid to take risks to be yourself and put passion into everything you do and good things will happen.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I would like to give a shoutout to all of the amazing women in my life who have taught me so much– my mother, my grandmothers, and my great aunties. These women nurtured and cared for me from the beginning and totally shaped the way I carry myself in this world. My main passion with The Pasta Queen is to teach people all around the world the importance of eating well. Everything that I cook is made from scratch using high-quality ingredients because I truly believe that your health is everything. I was lucky enough to grow up surrounded by rich farmland where we harvested everything we ate from the fruits and vegetables right down to the wheat my family used to make pasta. My passion for cooking and eating well comes directly from all of the amazing women who came before me and I feel blessed to be able to now share this knowledge and passion with the world.

In addition to these inspiring women, I also have to take a moment to thank all of the cozy and magical Roman Trattoria’s that became like a second home to me growing up. These Trattoria’s serve amazing food, yes, but it’s about so much more than that. They are really about family and community and I’ve tried to cultivate that feeling you get while sitting in your favorite Roman eatery and share it with the world through The Pasta Queen which is all about love, family, and great food.

Website: https://thepastaqueen.cooking/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_pastaqueen/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thepastaqueenfb

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCChxSeTVekWoYJjowt6BqWA

Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_pastaqueen

Image Credits
Stef Galea