On any given day of the week, you’ll find chef Matthew Drazick Halip hand-rolling pasta in his home kitchen, prepping for his multi-course “pasta omakase” experience dubbed domi. Hosted out of his townhouse in Five Points, the intimate four-seat dinner blurs the line between pop-up and dinner party, with diners seated at the counter watching as Halip mixes sauces, pipes ricotta, and boils tortellini directly in front of them.
Diners arrive through the front door, left slightly ajar to indicate, ‘this is the place.’ Halip and his girlfriend, Hailey Hickman, warmly welcome each guest into their home. The space feels modern and sleek, yet undeniably cozy, adorned with house plants, art and photos on the walls, and Halip’s cooking tools prominently displayed inside of the otherwise spotless kitchen. Their adopted greyhound, a former race dog, lazily sprawls on the couch in the living room as the couple makes small talk with everyone before dinner begins.
On this particular Saturday night, Halip hosted two former co-workers from The Wolf’s Tailor, my friend Sarah, and myself. Although my friend and I had never met the other two guests, or Halip and Hickman for that matter, it quickly felt like we all knew each other. Conversation flowed freely between delicately prepared plates of pasta and glasses of BYOB wine. It’s all part of the vibe Halip aims to create at his aptly named pop-up, domi, which translates to ‘at home’ in Latin.
“I like the spirit of the omakase dining, which is come as you are, sit down, lean back, and let me take care of everything,” said Halip when asked why he doesn’t refer to the eight-course meal as a tasting menu or chef’s counter. “It’s more than just a feeding. It’s more than just a dining experience. Come in, have a glass of wine, feel at home, experience, watch someone cook in front of you. I think it’s more identifiable to the experience that I’m trying to create.”
Halip recently resigned from his position as a chef at The Wolf’s Tailor, Colorado’s only two-Michelin-starred restaurant, to focus on his passion project full-time.
“Between domi and Wolf’s, I was working 70 to 85 hours a week,” he recalled. “I also knew domi wasn’t going anywhere, and I had already booked out February and March, which gave me the confidence to start stepping back.
Path to Pasta
Halip’s path to pasta began somewhat accidentally. As a college student in Michigan trying to pay off a traffic ticket, he landed a job at an Italian deli after claiming he knew how to make pasta, despite never having done it before. He bought a cookbook by chef Marc Vetri and spent three days obsessively teaching himself how to craft different shapes and styles. Ironically, the deli used a machine and didn’t need any of the techniques he had studied, but the seed was already planted.
“I fell in love with the pasta making process,” said Halip.
Years later, while working at The Wolf’s Tailor, Vetri was hosting a pop-up at the restaurant while Halip was working there. The two would have a conversation that would become the blueprint for domi.
“It was an unbelievable full-circle moment. We were making gnocchi together and I started telling him about this dinner party concept I had,” Halip shared. “He basically told me, ‘You should abandon all that other stuff and just lean into pasta.’”
Vetri told Halip about a pasta omakase concept that he hosted at Vetri Cucina, his Michelin-recommended restaurant in Philadelphia. With that, he encouraged him to create his own version in Denver.
“The more I thought about it, the more it made sense,” he continued. “Pasta is what I love to do. It’s where my brain always goes anyway, everything becomes, ‘How can I turn this into a pasta?’”
While Vetri helped steer Halip toward the idea that would eventually become domi in its current form, the chef had been experimenting with the concept for years. While living and working in Italy, he would return home to Michigan and host five-course Italian tasting menus at his uncle’s restaurant, Alchemi, showcasing the techniques and dishes he had been learning abroad.
“My uncle told me I needed to come up with a brand before I could keep doing pop-ups,” Halip said. “So I spent however long coming up with the name domi. I wanted it to feel like a return home.”
Today, domi is an amalgamation of all of Halip’s experiences, from hand-rolling pasta, a craft he perfected while studying at the Vecchia Scuola Bolognese in Bologna, to working with hyper-local ingredients, which he did at Osteria del Viandante in Emilia-Romagna. His menu also reflects the influence of Le Calandre, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant by Massimiliano Alajmo outside Padua, where he was introduced to ingredients like dashi, yuzu, and kosho, as well as the fermentation techniques he later refined at The Wolf’s Tailor.
“I don’t want to do classic Italian food, it’s been done enough. I’m not going to make carbonara better than the next guy,” Halip shared. “I wanted to put my own spin on the food. I think Asian cuisine and Italian cuisine actually have a lot of overlap, and I haven’t seen it explored very much.”
Bon Appetit
The menu at domi is ever changing. On the night we dined, dishes included tortellini in brodo, a small ring-shaped pasta stuffed with porchetta floating in a dashi-inspired broth; agnolotti del plin filled with braised lamb shank and presented atop a linen napkin, a nod to the traditional rustic way it’s served, with fondo bruno (a rich brown stock) on the side; and soft semolina gnocchi tossed in a mushroom dashi and cultured butter.
Halip even presented a pasta shape of his own invention, which he calls the Tazza – a crown-shaped ravioli stuffed with kombucha squash and served with a rich duck ragu in the center, all sitting atop parmigiano crema and salsa macha.
“I wanted a way to showcase a ragu with a filled pasta,” said Halip. “I love that dual flavor where you can have a rich meaty ragu with a strong vegetable, like squash, that can inherit so many flavors and still stand up against a really dense ragu.”
The pasta shapes not only have a purpose when it comes to sauce, said the chef, but they can also tell a story. That storytelling remains the crux of the domi experience. That, and the actual person-to-food relationship.
“I like to be able to cook in front of people. I like to walk them through the process of creation and cooking and serving,” he shared. “I think that’s something we’re missing in a lot of dining, you go somewhere, you eat the food, but you’re not connected to where it came from.”
Halip currently hosts dinners Wednesday through Saturday and also offers hands-on pasta classes where guests learn to roll dough and shape pasta before sitting down to eat their creations. Both experiences are priced at $135. Sign up for Halip’s mailing list at domiden.com to snag a reservation.
Pop-ups at Mizuna and with Up NXT DEN at BearLeek are also on the horizon. Eventually, Halip may open a brick-and-mortar restaurant, but he’s determined to preserve the intimacy that defines domi.
“If it ever becomes a restaurant, it would still need this level of intimacy where you have the counter and the chefs talking to the customers describing the food,” Halip said. “I never want to get rid of that part of domi because I think that’s what makes it unique.”
