Borromini has pulled its 100-layer lasagna from the menu
‘The dish had become too dominant,’ restaurateur Stephen Starr says.
Borromini’s 100-layer lasagna has been 86ed.
The showpiece pasta dish that seemed to land on nearly every table at Stephen Starr’s swish Italian restaurant in Rittenhouse came off the menu last week.
Starr told The Inquirer that the issue was not that people weren’t ordering it. It was that too many people were.
“The dish had become too dominant,” Starr said. “People wanted it, but it was overshadowing the other pastas. The other pastas are as good or better.”
The 100-layer lasagna was never just another entrée. Starr first encountered it in 2009 at New York’s Del Posto, where chef Mark Ladner devised the tower of pasta, béchamel, tomato, and cheese. Years later, when Starr hired Ladner to help reopen Babbo in New York, he also drafted him to recreate the lasagna for Borromini.
» READ MORE: The making of Borromini
What followed during Borromini’s menu development in 2025 was a prolonged and, at times, uneasy pursuit.
In test after test, Starr said it wasn’t quite right. It became his Great White Whale. (“Call me béchamel” could be the opening sentence of this saga.)
Ladner said he had created dozens of versions over the years, so he wasn’t certain which was stuck in Starr’s memory. Even after a “final” lasagna was approved for Borromini’s August opening, Starr kept pushing for something deeper and more visceral, prompting more rounds of refinement after the restaurant opened.
The lasagna was also a feat of engineering, and — as such — laborious and expensive to produce, even at a $28 menu price. Cooks built it in advance in slabs, using long wooden dowels to hold the layers together. The kitchen finished individual portions under a broiler to crisp the edges.
Though popular with customers, the lasagna was not a critic’s favorite. In November, The Inquirer’s Craig LaBan called it “a miracle of noodle engineering” that ultimately ate more like “a doorstop than a showstopper.” In a review published Tuesday — after the lasagna had already come off the menu — Philadelphia Magazine deemed it merely “okay.”
“We may want to come back with a different lasagna — but not 100 layers," Starr said.
Meanwhile, in New York, Ladner had created yet another version of the lasagna for Babbo’s opening menu last fall: a crispy-edged dish in the spirit of Detroit-style pizza, portioned tableside for four and priced at $100.
Starr said that lasagna has also since been removed “for a similar reason.”
“Everyone kept ordering it,” he said. “It’s not good for the restaurant when people are ordering just one thing.”
