Justin Fox Burks
Made with peas, mushrooms, prosciutto, and cream sauce, Maccheroncini Boscaiola is one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes.
It’s an hour before dinner service starts at Chef Michele D’oto’s The Pasta Maker, and cook Lightning King is doing just that: making linguine at a long butcher-block table behind the restaurant’s storefront window. He cracks eggs, and the deep yellow yokes slip into a pasta machine where they mix with semolina. Quickly, in a bit of culinary magic, linguine spills out, light and airy like ribbon confetti made with golden dough.
Little wonder customers are embracing the restaurant, tucked inside Germantown’s Exeter Village and open since late July. Many know D’oto and his partner Laura Derrick from Pasta Italia, the couple’s former fine dining restaurant in Cordova. But this restaurant is a different breed. “Here, it is definitely more fun, more casual, and more affordable,” D’oto says.
Certainly, D’oto’s masterful match of pasta and sauce is a signature skill. Grilled sausage and julienne rapini hide inside rigatoni tossed with olive oil and Pecorino cheese. Shrimp, clams, and crabmeat mingle in a sea of spaghetti, garlic, lemon juice, white wine, and olive oil. And for Rosette al Forno, béchamel sauce made with Fontina and mascarpone — two of Italy’s great cheeses — drapes four pasta rosebuds just starting to bloom.
Serving lunch and dinner, the restaurant’s menu also includes flatbreads and appetizers like marinated Salmon Carpaccio, so delicately sliced the salmon seems to melt into its plate. Chalkboard specials for fresh fish, sandwiches, and soups change every few days. Hope for French lentil soup, cooked slowly with aromatics and finished with parsley and Parmesan.
The restaurant is closed on Sundays, but D’oto is still hard at work, teaching students the history and how-to’s behind pasta making in ongoing three-class series. “We will drink wine and coffee, and cook and eat,” D’oto explains. Still, there’s more to come: a comprehensive wine list (for now, customers can bring their own) and a new Pasta Italia restaurant in East Memphis sometime next year.
2095 Exeter Road, Germantown (901-799-3928) $-$$$
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Justin Fox Burks
The menu includes four different flat breads, including Margherita topped with onions, peppers, and grilled sausage.
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Justin Fox Burks
Lightning King makes different varieties of fresh pasta every day. The pasta also is dried, bagged, and sold at the restaurant for home cooking.
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Justin Fox Burks
Ask Laura Derrick to name her favorite chef and Chef Michele D’oto answers first: “She likes the one who makes the pasta best!”
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Justin Fox Burks
Eat Salmon Carpaccio like this: Break off a piece of crostini, top it with salmon and arugula, and then pass on the appetizer to share.
