America's favorite comfort food

Mac and cheese fits every taste - and budget

Crumbs, which brown during baking, top this mac and ricotta dish. (Food Styling/Karoline Boehm Goodnick; Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff)

You can be sitting in a high chair or in a high-style Italian chair, and if someone sets a bowl of mac and cheese in front of you, you're bound to be delighted. This humble bowl of mostly white ingredients is currently the most sought-after comfort food on American tables. It suits everyone: teens, vegetarians, lumberjacks, sophisticates.

Mac and cheese is on many restaurant menus, partly because of the economy, mostly because customers love it and want it. The dish went from the home to the professional kitchen (dishes usually travel the opposite way: from chefs to home cooks). And because restaurant diners are expecting something considerably fancier than a good version of the famous blue box, chefs have gone to town, using top-quality imported pasta, heavy cream, farmstead cheeses, and their own flourishes: truffles and truffle oil, lobster, and secret flavorings. At Glenn's in Newburyport, chef-owner Glenn Mayers adds five cheeses to his bechamel sauce, stirs that into penne, and spoons the mixture over morsels of warm lobster in a gratin dish. Even though he changes his menu all the time, he can't take this dish off. "It's big time popular," he says.

Nicolas Boutin at Asana, the restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental, Boston decided that his menu wasn't too upscale for a good mac and cheese. "We need to think about the residents, the guests in the rooms. Away from home they want comfort food," says the French native. He named the dish MO'C and cheese (MO for Mandarin Oriental) and prepares it much like he ate it as a child: with elbows, which he calls coquillette (the name means shells, but "this is what you called macaroni"), shredded Emmental, a hard cheese with a nutty quality, and Vermont creme fraiche, which he considers "a beautiful product." To this basic dish, he may add lobster or truffles or brown the top. It goes to the table in an elegant white porcelain square.

With all the Italian pasta shapes now available, many cooks like a pasta shape that's more unusual than elbows. Any pasta with a little curl or hollow - to catch the sauce - works well. Some unusual choices are farfalle or bow ties, lumachine, which are shell-like, and strozzapreti (the translation is "priest stranglers"), tiny ties. As for the other ingredients, cheeses can be subtle, like mozzarella, or stronger, like Emmental, but they must have a good melting quality. A white sauce, cream, or just butter and cheese bind the mixture. You can take a mac and cheese from the saucepan to the table or dust it with crumbs - elegant Japanese panko or buttery Ritz crackers, which the chef at Zon's in Jamaica Plain uses - and get a nice crust.

Amherst cooking teacher and author Betty Rosbottom uses rigatoni in her favorite version; the pasta are elbow shaped, but larger, so there's plenty of room for sauce to collect. Last week she taught an all-pasta class at the Northampton location of Different Drummer's Kitchen and included a mac and cheese she's been making for years. She begins with a spicy homemade tomato sauce, which she stirs into the pasta, along with havarti and Parmesan cheeses, then tops the dish with chopped black olives. Rosbottom, whose most recent book is "Sunday Soup," is a contributing writer for Bon Appetit magazine. She sent the pasta dish to her editor there some years ago and it became that month's cover recipe. "It's hard to find anyone who doesn't like it," she says.

When restaurateur Damien DiPaola was a boy, his father made him plates of pasta al burro; it translates as pasta with butter, but it's really butter and cheese. DiPaola, chef and owner of Ristorante Damiano in the North End, now serves penne and gorgonzola on his menu, but his Swiss-Sicilian family, he says, "didn't do big heavy cream sauces." DiPaola still craves pasta al burro, which was made with spaghettini. "My father put the hot pasta water in the plate. The plate would get hot; he would dump out the water, add a nice big spoon of sweet creamy butter in the plate and it would melt slowly." In went the steaming pasta, right from the colander with a little cooking water clinging to it. Then lots of Parmigiano Reggiano, which turned the dish creamy.

DiPaola learned about creamy pasta from his father's brother, Nino. "My mother's going to kill me for this," says DiPaola as he starts the story. "Uncle Nino, he was in and out of jail in Italy." In one of the jails, goes the story, Nino ate a dish that came to be known as maccheroni alla carcierata ("convict's macaroni"). "This dish, with mushrooms, cream, and mozzarella, was sticky, stringy, fun to eat," says DiPaola. As to whether Uncle Nino really ate the dish in jail, says his nephew, "We don't know to this day whether it was a fib on his part."

The restaurateur took the popular dish of penne and gorgonzola, which is on menus all over Italy, and added softened sun-dried tomatoes, roasted garlic cloves, and blanched spinach to the pasta, blue cheese, Parmigiano, and pecorino. He prefers to use the pen-quill shape because "there's no twirling involved with penne. You put the pasta on your fork and you can get the bits of spinach and garlic and really make a mess."

Most restaurants make the dish to order, which seems like it might be cumbersome during service, but all the parts are ready. In many kitchens, pasta has been partially cooked and a white sauce is ready. This is how Mayers of Glenn's does it. His bechamel sauce is waiting. The lobster is cooked and only needs warming. He adds Parmesan, mozzarella, provolone, smoked gouda, a little cream cheese, and fontina to the sauce and penne. Panko crumbs go on top, and he runs it under the salamander (an incredibly hot broiler) to bubble and brown. It's so rich, he says, that "a lot of people get it for themselves and end up taking [the rest] home."

Fewer cheeses but a more involved method go into Ecco's lobster mac and cheese. At the East Boston restaurant, chef David Fitzgerald buys fresh lobsters daily. He uses lumachine, a pasta shape he describes as a cross between a regular shell and a snail shell. To begin, he sautes garlic and shallots in butter, adds partially cooked pasta to toast it a little, and deglazes the pan with pinot grigio. When it bubbles out, he adds bechamel, which he makes with lemon rind, fresh thyme, and bay leaves. "I add a touch of cream to stabilize it, grated fontina, a touch of aged fontina that adds that little je ne sais quoi - it has a very assertive flavor - and a little Parmesan. Then I add the lobster meat and heat until it's just warm.

"Oh yes, and fish sauce."

Asian fish sauce?

"It has an umami presence in the sauce." says the chef. "It really grounds the dish."

There's no fish sauce, but plenty of truffles in the mac and aged cheddar at Tastings Wine Bar & Bistro in Patriot Place. The Foxborough restaurant offers tapas-style dishes, this one in a bowl. It's a stovetop version that contains black truffles, truffle juice, heavy cream, and a sprinkling of bread crumbs that chef Richard Garcia has smoked wrapped in foil in a smoker. "It's one of our best sellers," says Garcia. He likes it so much that he also makes it at home for his two children, ages 3 and 1. "One pan, and it takes five minutes," says the chef.

He does make one concession for the small ones at home. "I 86 the truffles."