Inside Le Virtù’s La Panarda 8-Hour Eating Marathon

Andrew Wood hosts marathon dinner party La Panarda at Le Virtù. / Photography courtesy of Le Virtù

     Listen to the audio edition here:

“It’s certainly a labor of love,” Andrew Wood tells me when I ask him why anyone in their right mind would attempt an eight-hour, 40-course dinner party in their own backyard. And then he tells me about Italy.

He tells me about La Panarda — a mad feast held annually in the tiny village of Villavallelonga, tucked away in the mountains of the Marsica region of Abruzzo. He tells me about the families who open their doors to neighbors and relatives for private parties that have been going on for centuries. Thirty, 40, sometimes 50 courses, served communally, over the course of an entire day and an entire night. He tells me about the wandering musicians who go house to house, playing for the guests in exchange for food and wine; about the days leading up to the parties where the people of the village cook massive pots of soup and frascarelli pasta in the piazza that they bring door-to-door, filling everyone’s bowls; and nights of parties on the streets with meats roasting over open fires, bottles of wine, singers, dancers, and costumed wolves and devils and saints.

From left: Guests gathered around a table for La Panarda; porchetta roasting on an open flame outside Le Virtù

“Community and communion,” Wood says. That’s what La Panarda is about. The real La Panarda. And he knows because he was there in January of 2024 — him, Le Virtù’s owners Francis Cratil-Cretarola and Catherine Lee. They’d been invited by the mayor of Villavallelonga to experience the real Panarda after he came to visit Le Virtù, hosted by one of the families in town and allowed to see everything that goes into this kind of celebration and what it means to them. And it moved him.

“In this tiny town frozen in ice in the mountains,” he tells me. “Seeing a community so knit together like that. It was a very…revelatory kind of experience.”

In Villavallelonga, they’ve been doing the Panarda every year since 1657. At Le Virtù in South Philly, they’ve been doing their own version (most years) since 2011, and the next one is coming up soon — on Sunday, June 14^th. So I was curious exactly how he and his team pull off an event like this. I mean, we’re talking about 40 courses, minimum. Everything from simple pastas to whole lamb roasted over open flames. We’re talking 50 guests over eight hours and something like 2,000 individual plates, plus wine, plus music, plus aperitifs and digestifs served off an ice luge. It’s a huge lift. So where do you even begin?

Outside Le Virtù

“I start with a blank page,” Wood explains. Because that’s where all great things begin. Tabula rasa. No expectations.

Then he writes down everything. “Every idea I can think of,” he says. He goes through cookbooks and notes, old menus, his own memories. He writes down every single idea he can think of, then he thinks of more. Then he does some more research. Then he writes those ideas down, too.

There are some things that are givens, he says. That must be on the menu.

“Like, there’s definitely going to be a whole lamb. There’s definitely going to be a whole suckling pig. There’s definitely going to be swordfish and rabbits and some giant piece of beef on the bone. There’s definitely going to be a brodetto…”

At Le Virtù, they’ve been doing their version of La Panarda for a little while now. Wood has already done two himself — in 2024 and 2025. This will be his third. So he understands a little bit how this has to go. It’ll be broken into two categories: things from the sea and things from the land. And service will be plotted out in waves — X number of dishes at blank o’clock, followed by X number of dishes an hour later.

“Because it is such a labor of love, I started thinking about it like a month ago,” he tells me. And after he wrote down everything he could think of — every dish, every recipe, every possible option — he sat with it for a little while.

“Then I start to edit down,” he says. “And edit down, and edit down.”

La Panarda’s menu

The trick, he says, is understanding that not everyone is going to eat every bite on every plate. That would be insane. So he comes up with dishes that can express the fullness of their flavors quickly and simply. “So even if you only have two bites, you still taste it,” he explains. “So that there’s still a coherent structure.”

That means simplifying. Making every plate recognizable and approachable and — most importantly — memorable.

It takes him weeks to do. To get a menu that will work and that’s interesting to him — combining both the classic dishes from Abruzzo that would be included on a traditional Panarda menu and some from the wider regions of Italy to keep it fresh. He tells me that this week (the very beginning of June) he’ll start bringing in product and packing his coolers and pantry, and that in the week leading up to the event, he and his crew will start laying on two or three extra hours each day for prep.

I ask him if he has to bring in extra help in the run-up or on the day of the Panarda, and he laughs at me.

“No,” he says. Because his team? “They’re the best. I don’t need anyone else.”

On the morning of the 14th — the day of the Panarda — he tells me he’ll probably show up to Le Virtù around 7 a.m. He’ll have to get the fires going and start getting things organized. Here in South Philly, Le Virtù’s version of La Panarda start at noon and runs until 8 p.m. In Villavallelonga, it starts in the afternoon and runs all night, until 8 a.m. the next morning when partygoers walk around the village, offering bowls of fava bean soup and egg bread to the neighbors, ensuring that no one goes hungry.

One of the many dishes served at Le Virtù’s La Panarda event

I ask him how crazy it gets in the kitchen, and he says it’s not really that crazy. That it’s actually not as frenetic as, say, a Friday night dinner rush because the entire thing is a lot more deliberate, and that for a lot of those eight hours, he and his team are right out there in the yard with the diners, cooking over open fires, tending to the meats or talking with guests. And among those who are there for the party, a kind of camaraderie develops because, well, you’re there. You’re in the middle of this thing for eight straight hours, eating and drinking, spending most of a day with the same group of people. He tells me that about a third of the people who show up to any of Le Virtù’s Panardas have been to all of Le Virtù’s Panardas. They’re regulars. And they help the rookies pace themselves and get into the spirit of the thing.

“It’s not clinical,” he tells me, meaning the whole event, the planning, the execution. “It’s very, very human. And the intent is not to just cultivate the best feast we can put on, but to cultivate a community. To offer comfort that transcends the event, the food.”

Then he stops a minute, thinks about his time in Villavallelonga and how it changed how he thinks about his work, his life. He says, “What we’re doing with the Panarda, we’re really trying to tear down that barrier of it being a restaurant. We’re trying to serve a community.”

La Panarda guests passing a plate of ravioli

And if you’re interested in experiencing that kind of community for yourself, you can find more information and get tickets to this year’s La Panarda right here. As mentioned, it’s happening on Sunday, June 14th, from noon until 8 p.m. Tickets will run you $550 (not including tax or tip), which is steep, sure, but does include eight hours of food, 10 or more paired wines, entertainment and communion with your fellow humans. It also pays for the efforts of the community (of restaurant employees) that’s putting the event together, so keep that in mind, too.

One thing’s for sure: You won’t leave hungry. Or without some new friends and stories to tell.