Lose Yourself in Eminem’s New Mom’s Spaghetti Pasta Sauce #DetroitFood

Union Joints

Make sure your palms aren’t sweaty while opening a jar of Eminem’s Mom’s Spaghetti

The worlds of hip hop and food continue to collide, this time with Detroit’s own Eminem inviting home cooks across the internet to try a jar of the marinara sauce used at his downtown restaurant, Mom’s Spaghetti. Depicting a jar of red gravy smashing against a red and white checkerboard surface, Em announced in an Instagram post on Wednesday that sales for Mom’s Spaghetti pasta sauce would drop online on Thursday, October 26.

“Get your sweaters ready for some tasty s’ghetti sauce!!!” reads the online description for the sauce. “For the most legitimate Mom’s Spaghetti pasta, pull some pre-cooked spaghetti from the fridge and reheat in a frying pan while adding your Mom’s Spaghetti sauce ... It’s ready when the noodles have a bit of a snap and the sauce is heated to taste ... That’s how you get a great leftover taste the first time around! Add powdered parm and serve with some Texas toast with garlic butter for s’ghetti like we serve it up on Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit.”

Each 25-ounce jar sells for $13 or two for $25. According to the website, orders will begin shipping on Monday, October 30. Curt Catallo, owner of the Union Joints restaurant group, which operates Mom’s Spaghetti restaurant in downtown Detroit, tells Eater that the sauce is produced and distributed out of a warehouse in Ferndale.

“Along the way, we started saying, ‘What about jarring this sauce that we’ve kind of developed and tweaked’ and that’s what brought us to this point,” says Catallo.

Union Joints’ work developing Mom’s Spaghetti began in 2017 when Eminem’s camp approached Catallo’s team about collaborating on a three-day pop-up event hosted at the Shelter. The club, located below Saint Andrew’s Hall, is where the rapper’s fictionalized character Jimmy “B-Rabbit” Smith Jr. participates in a rap battle in the 2002 film 8 Mile, loosely based on the artist’s life. Since then, the pop-up has roamed across America, appearing at the Coachella Music Festival in 2018, during the 2022 Super Bowl in Los Angeles, and in New York in 2022 in commemoration of the movie’s 20th anniversary. In 2016, Eminem collaborated with Unfortunate Portrait to produce official “Mom’s Spaghetti” t-shirts.

Catallo tells Eater that his team was tasked with developing, what he calls, a flavor reminiscent of store-bought sauce that a harried mom might pick up at the supermarket. One key difference between the Pregos and Ragus of the world, Mom’s Spaghetti pasta sauce uses no sugar but still manages to have that sweet aftertaste, Cattalo says.

“The goal was to make make a scratch sauce that tasted like going straight from the jar,” says Catallo. “It doesn’t taste like the kind of sauce that grandma used to bake. It tastes like the kind of stuff mom used to open.”

Now, to round out that s’ghetti with a glass of Snoop Dogg Cali Red from the local party store.

from Eater Detroit - All