Italian Soul Food
Handmade Piedmontese pasta is heaven on 14th Avenue.
Since then he’s been holding forth in his square kitchen, amid gleaming stockpots and bottled oils on warm wood shelves and green herbs sprouting from jars. With an indulgent smile at some joke that had his whole youthful kitchen crew chuckling, the chef dusted the plate before him with parmigiano and handed it off to our waiter. “Your tajarin,” the waiter pronounced, setting it before us. “Pasta made from flour and egg yolks.”
I expected it to be rich, but I wasn’t prepared for the texture. The flour binds with the egg yolks to create a pasta that held its integrity in the simple ragu and resisted going to mush in the mouth. But never had I encountered such fairylike delicacy in so muscular a pasta. The laborious hand-cutting—“a Zen thing,” Neidermeyer calls it—enables a finer strand than a machine would, but also creates an unevenness that enhances mouthfeel. Nobody else is making pasta like this in Seattle. Few are doing it outside Italy.
That’s where Neidermeyer learned to make it, from an old man named Cinto in the village of Barbaresco, set amid the hills and chestnut forests of Piedmont. The young Redmond-bred Neidermeyer had been stirring up dreams of Italy for some time, ever since starting as a lunch cook at age 17 at the lauded Bellevue bakery, London’s Bakehouse. Gigs at Bandoleone and Brasa followed, and then Cafe Juanita, where he served as “everything guy” for owner and chef Holly Smith. One day while Neider-meyer was out shoveling gravel, Cafe Juanita’s former owner Peter Dow came by, spouting stories about his own apprenticeship in Italy. He knew a wine producer who knew a pastamaker who would certainly nurture a young talent like Neidermeyer. The young chef went home and bought an airline ticket.
Never had I encountered such delicacy in so muscular a pasta. Nobody else is making pasta like this in Seattle. Few are doing it outside Italy.
In Barbaresco, Neidermeyer felt like his soul had found its home. By strange coincidence, he also encountered a familiar palette of ingredients. Black truffles, common in any Piedmont kitchen, grow under Northwest pines in an even more distinctively flavored variant. In one dish we tried, the thin slices lent their sublimely dirty perfume (for an extra $10) to a dish of caramelly, slow-roasted goat with heirloom Italian kale and chanterelles. (The goat, often tough in restaurants, was fall-apart tender here.) Heirloom chicories, rife throughout Piedmont, grow profuse and leafy at a farm in Carnation; Neidermeyer cuts them into rollicking salads loaded with marinated rabbit loin and curls of parmigiano reggiano. Even veal, the pride of Piedmont, appears at Spinasse in a Washington State grass-fed version, poached to a winsome blush, then lavished with tuna aioli.
“Traditional vitello tonnato,” pronounced our waiter, who had strongly recommended the dish. Like every server I encountered at Cascina Spinasse, he knew his food and wine but felt no need to flog the uninitiated with his intelligence—a winning quality in a city crammed with culinary know-it-alls. I dragged a parchment-thin fold of veal through the mayonnaise and put it in my mouth, closing my eyes against the cool purity of the tuna, piqued with capers and lemon, and delivered through as lush a sauce as I have ever known. I swallowed, sipped my Nebbiolo, and thanked heaven for Neidermeyer’s Italian soul.
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Published: December 2008
