The Hugo's mac and cheese is one of those nouveau affairs - corkscrew pasta, multiple cheeses - it's excellent, but I wish they wouldn't call it mac and cheese. I use to love Koo Koo Roo's mac and cheese, but Koo Koo Roo is completely worthless now and is a shoddy joke.
Timing strikes again. I was reading Bill Buford's
Heat during my break at work, and came across the following passage:
...Until the second half of the twentieth century, "pasta" wasn't really a kitchen word (you almost never see it in the old cookbooks) but an inventory word, meaning a food, any food, savory or sweet, made with dough....Instead of dried pasta, you had macaroni. That had been the generic word people used for five centuries or so, meaning not just the tubular kind but all kinds, originating in Sicily and then spreading to Sardinia and Naples and shipped through Genoa to the principal ports of Europe. Thomas Jefferson ate it in France and was so taken with it that he dispatched trunkloads home, becoming the first person to introduce dried pasta to the United States.
That being the case, the use of corkscrew pasta - rotelli - makes perfectly good sense, as it has all those nooks for the cheesey sauce to cling to. That's also why Kraft uses shells for some of their more upscale pasta and cheese mixes - they hold onto the sauce better. And the corkscrews and shells are, indeed, "mac".
Now, if they were using fresh pasta instead of dried, there would be a problem, as fresh pasta has an entirely different heritage - it even uses a different kind of flour. But that's worth discussing at another time.
