Pasta Night Monday started at Troutbeck on April 8, and on the second week of this offering, it appeared that word had already gotten out. I worried the crowd might feel slim on a spring Monday off the beaten path in Amenia, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The room buzzed with life and was filled with a range of guests that included couples, groups, and families with kids. It doesn’t hurt that most restaurants in the area are closed on Mondays, but as I quickly learned, Troutbeck’s Pasta Night is worth waiting the weekend for.

The first course is served family-style and there’s only one dessert option, so the only big decision is narrowing down the main course pasta dish. When it comes to this menu, you can’t really make a bad choice, especially since all pasta is made in-house by Executive Chef Vincent Gilberti, who grew up watching his Italian grandmother make pasta. But choosing was easier said than done.

Andrew, my dining companion, barely hesitated and chose the garganelli with merguez sausage, favas, and green garlic, but I was torn. The saffron tagliolini with smoked skate cheek and ramps was compelling (local ramp season in our corner of the world is a thing), but I ultimately chose the black emmer agnolotti with wild onion, nettles, and morels.

The menu listed the items we’d receive for the first course — I thought we’d get a few bites of each — but I was unprepared for the volume of food that landed on our table. While I sat like a deer in the headlights wondering where to begin, Andrew wasted no time and tore off a huge chunk of the house-baked rosemary focaccia before I could even get a photo of it. Andrew’s raving about both the bread and the lightly whipped butter was compelling, so I joined him.

“I just dipped my bread in the butter, and if dipping butter in bread is wrong, I don’t want to be right,” I said, dipping again. In a move of solidarity, Andrew ignored his butter knife and joined me as a butter-dipping heathen before we moved on to the other four dishes on the table. (NOTE: a quick peep back at the menu let us know it wasn’t actually butter we’d been dipping our bread into — it was whipped ricotta. Our minds were blown.)

The thing about a meal like this, in a place like this, is that it’s nice having the menu handy to reference what exactly you’re eating. This is in part because the dishes are either deliberately simple — like the citrus-marinated olives — or filled with uncommon ingredients or preparations — like bagna cauda, moliterno, and carta di musica.

I could go into detail about every dish we ate — the salad full of three types of peas and edible flowers, the navy bean dip with preserved chilis — but the menu isn’t static and is based on what is available locally and what inspires Chef Vinny.