Paradise with pasta
Manelli and Lugli may not have had years of culinary experience but they had something better – an innate knowledge of pasta,

There are a thousand reasons why people wash up on the beach here. For Stefano Manelli and his partner, Roberta Lugli, it was a matter of changing both location and vocation.
The owners of Stefano’s Italian Cuisine in Muri are originally from Milan, Italy. When they decided to make a radical shift in their lives nearly 10 years ago, it wasn’t exactly a matter of throwing a dart at a map of the world, but it was close.
“We talked to friends who had been in this area before and it was probably the first time I’d heard about the Cooks,” says Manelli, 40. “And then we started researching, first in the atlas and then on the internet.”
A holiday to Rarotonga in 1999 turned into a scouting trip, and the couple liked what they saw.
“We were looking for a small place that wasn’t too commercialized and yet green and safe,” says Manelli, who, at the time, was eager to leave behind a job as a computer consultant. “We weren’t actually looking at coming this far (from Italy) but it was a place that met our requirements, including being English-speaking.”
What Manelli and Lugli didn’t fully appreciate at the time was what a prime location they’d scored for their first foray into restaurant ownership. You can’t swing a spatula in Muri without anointing a tourist.
“That was basically the only option available (at the time),” admits Manelli. “We were just lucky to find a spot in the busiest area.”
Shifting halfway around the world to start a business you have no experience with can be the perfect recipe for disaster but it was a challenge the couple eagerly embraced.
“We sold our house and left our good jobs in big companies,” says Manelli. “We basically threw everything away. This could have gone completely wrong but we were thinking, you know, we are not going to war. If this goes wrong, we can go back. We had a good life but we needed a change.”
There were some surprises in the early days, but Manelli says the good ones outweighed the bad.
“It was the first time owning a business, and we’d never been involved in a food business,” he says. “Many things could have gone wrong, but I’d have to say that many things went right. Better than we’d expected.”
Stefano’s Italian Cuisine is all pasta, all the time. Manelli and Lugli may not have had years of culinary experience when they opened for business in 2001, but they had something better – an innate knowledge of pasta, something that you acquire more through heritage than experience.
“We’ve been eating it all our lives, so we know the goal,” Manelli says of the expertise required to turn a mixture of flour and eggs – plus a splash of water – into a cultural icon.
“In the process of making it, we taste it, we feel it with our hands, and we understand the humidity. That’s the feeling we have had for all our lives. If I were to teach someone who’s never had pasta, it would take years to get it right.”
Stefano’s started small, with a basic menu built around fresh pasta and, except for adding the odd extra table, starting to import Italian wine and coffee, and phasing out the takeaways component of the enterprise, nothing much has changed since Day 1. That’s just the way Manelli planned it.
“Here, pasta is the main attraction of the dish,” Manelli says. “Somewhere else, it’s something on the side, like a tonne of prawns on a bed of pasta. We have pasta with some prawns.”
Simplicity, he explains, is the order of the day.
“We use very few ingredients,” says Manelli. “One or two flavours and finished. Some people are scared when they see the simplicity. Pasta and tomatoes and basil – that’s it? But that’s the key to us: tasty and simple.”
While Manelli concentrates on the pasta, Lugli is kept busy preparing such bellissimo desserts as panna cotta and tiramisu, usually complemented by sauces made from seasonal local fruit.
Customers who have dined in Milan say the quality of pasta at Stefano’s rivals that of Italy’s finest eateries.
“That’s what we want,” says Manelli. “If they say, oh, this is just like I had in Auckland last week, I feel down.”

Why bacon is popular
Italian food means pizza and lasagne, right?
Not at Stefano’s Italian Cuisine.
However, unlike some Chinese food that is more North American in origin than Asian, Stefano’s owner Stefano Manelli says pizza is, in fact, an Italian dish.
“But that doesn’t mean every restaurant in Italy makes it,” he says.” But I understand that every Italian place outside Italy makes it.”
Which is why he’s not really surprised when people show up at his eatery looking for a large Hawaiian Deluxe. The real surprise comes when customers discover there is no pizza pie on the menu.
“We would never make it,” says Manelli. “Pizza is seen as a fast food and we don’t want that. We prefer to makes fewer dishes for a proper dinner, then serve 50 people with fast food.”
Nine years in the restaurant business means Manelli has had plenty of time to fine-tune his menu.
“We tried different dishes and we understand now our customers’ taste,” he says.
Visits to his native Italy over the years have left his appetite whetted to bring more of his native country’s flavours to Rarotonga, but experience has taught him it would not be financially feasible to replicate them in his new home.
“We know that we can’t have the same ingredients here,” he says. “Or they would be way too expensive to import. It would be nonsense.”
What hasn’t worked in his pasta over the years: anchovies, raisins, capers.
What has worked: anything that contains the word ‘bacon’.
“I know if I write ‘bacon’ anywhere in the ingredients, it’s going to be popular,” Manelli says. “I explored a more southern Italy pasta, which has some tomatoes in it. I added some bacon and now it’s the most popular dish we can put out. People say, I’m coming back in a couple of nights, make sure you have this.”
Mention pasta and some people turn up their noses at the thought of putting all that starch and all those carbs into the temple they call a body. But one need only look at the slim figures of Manelli and his partner, Roberta Lugli, to realize it’s not the pasta that packs on the kilos.
“It depends how you dress it,” says Manelli. “If you have it simple – with some tomatoes and basil, a little bit of oil – I tell you, you won’t get fat. If you have tonnes of butter or tonnes of cream on it, that’s how you get fat. But it’s not the pasta.”

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