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The Actual Pasta Prince of LA – Street Food Icons

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Los Angeles has thousands of food trucks slinging tacos, hot dogs, and Korean barbecue — but until 2016, none of them were making fresh pasta to order.

That gap is what convinced Prince Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia, Prince of Venice and Piedmont and grandson of Umberto II, the last king of Italy, to park a cobalt-blue truck on the streets of LA and start extruding dough in front of customers. Vice Munchies’ Street Food Icons caught up with him for “The Actual Pasta Prince of LA,” tracing how a royal exile ended up running one of the city’s more unlikely food-truck operations. The truck, called Prince of Venice, pairs imported Italian ingredients with Southern California produce and sells restaurant-caliber pasta at street prices.

• Filiberto launched the Prince of Venice food truck in Los Angeles in 2016 after noticing the city’s food-truck scene had no one specializing in fresh, handmade pasta.
• He partnered with Milan-born chef Mirko Paderno, and the truck runs a Rosito Bisani TR/75 extruder visible through a large viewing window so customers watch the dough get mixed and shaped on board.
• Menu staples — rigatoni in black winter truffle cream sauce, bucatini amatriciana, seafood fettuccine, orecchiette pesto, and bolognese — run under $16, finished off with tiramisu.

A Royal Title and a Street-Food Idea

Filiberto’s biography reads nothing like a typical food-truck owner’s. He’s an exile who grew up outside Italy before the royal ban on his family was lifted, carrying the title Prince of Venice and Piedmont as the grandson of Umberto II. Rather than trade on that pedigree for ceremony, he pointed it at a practical observation: LA had every cuisine imaginable rolling around on wheels, but nobody was making pasta fresh, on the spot, the way it’s done in an Italian kitchen. That observation became the entire premise of Prince of Venice.

Building the Truck Around the Extruder

Getting fresh pasta onto a truck isn’t as simple as swapping a griddle for a stove. Filiberto brought in Mirko Paderno, a chef born in Milan, to run the culinary program, and the two built the operation around commercial-grade equipment rather than shortcuts — centered on the Rosito Bisani TR/75 extruder. The truck’s large viewing window turns the mixing and shaping of dough into part of the pitch: customers watching from the sidewalk see the same process a sit-down Italian restaurant would run in its back kitchen.

Flour, olive oil, and black truffles ship in directly from Italy, then meet organic produce sourced from farms across Southern California.

Current Seasonal Menu Offerings

The rotating list leans into regional Italian staples executed with imported ingredients: rigatoni finished in a black winter truffle cream sauce, bucatini amatriciana, seafood fettuccine, orecchiette tossed in pesto, and a classic bolognese. Everything is priced under $16, putting restaurant-level pasta in the same bracket as a taco-truck plate, and the menu closes out with tiramisu for dessert. It’s a formula anyone curious about food-truck mechanics or knife work in a cramped kitchen can appreciate — the same fascination that drives interest in knife-skills videos from professional kitchens, just applied to a truck window instead of a line cook’s station.

Leveraging the Title on the Street

Filiberto’s public profile — including his recognition from reality television — gave Prince of Venice a built-in hook that a typical truck launch wouldn’t have. But the brief behind the truck is straightforward: use restaurant-grade technique and imported ingredients to fill an obvious hole in LA’s street-food scene, then let the extruder and the viewing window do the selling on the sidewalk.

What sticks after watching the segment is the math of it — a truck running a Rosito Bisani extruder and truffles flown in from Italy, still keeping every plate under $16. That’s the pitch Prince of Venice makes to anyone standing in line behind the cobalt-blue window: pasta made the way a sit-down kitchen would make it, at the price of a taco-truck lunch.