accolades
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Italian-American turns out prime handmade pasta
for upscale tastes
By JOHN KESSLER
If you've been eating around Atlanta lately, you may have noticed the bulbous tortelloni that have taken over the city's better menus. Maybe you've had the porcini tortelloni with tomato water at Dish or the sweet pea and ricotta numbers served with chicken at Aria.
You can thank Elisa Gambino of Via Elisa -- a former CNN broadcast journalist who has decided to change Atlanta's pasta paradigm one handcrafted batch at a time.
Working from a small "pasta lab" on Howell Mill Road, Gambino and her assistant prepare very limited quantities on a daily basis. The pasta -- tortelloni, ravioli and plain strands -- mostly go to high-end restaurants and fancy clubs. But gourmet markets such as Star Provisions and Salumeria Taggiasca have standing orders. And a few lucky home cooks have found the shop and learned the rules of Via Elisa's retail operation.
The complicated rules.
First, you've got to arrive after 2 p.m., otherwise Gambino is likely to be zipping around town in her silver Passat wagon hand-delivering the plush bundles she spent all morning folding.
Second, you have to order the pasta one day ahead of time unless you're willing to go with the daily special flavor. And if you're going to order the pasta, you had best do so in an e-mail, because no one may be available to answer the phone, which is a cell that Gambino keeps in her apron pocket. But she can't really push the answer button when her hands are filled with dough or when she's mashing roasted winter squash and thickening it with crushed amaretti cookies.
When an artisanal product is made on such a small scale, the normal retail rules go out the window.
"At least when people find the shop, they usually come back," says Gambino.
The shop, in fact, is a charmer. The front room holds only a long wooden table, a flipboard displaying a handwritten list of the available flavors and a small refrigerator case with the daily special and the few accompaniments that Via Elisa pasta wants. Chunks of Parmigiano-Reggiano, salt-packed capers, aseptic juice-box containers of imported Italian besciamella (bëchamel) and jars of thin Italian tomato puree. (It makes for a superior sauce since it is processed without the sour-tasting citric acid used as a preservative in most American tomato products.)
Gambino comes to the counter from the pasta lab that you can see through a plate window, as neon-bright and cleanly tiled as a medical clinic. She wears a cotton apron and dun-colored T-shirt. She has strong arms and a cap of unruly frizz tamed under a hairnet and a headset that snakes down to the phone in her pocket. When you go for some of the more intensely flavored tortelloni -- Gorgonzola and radicchio, for instance -- she quickly advises to hold back on any notions of complicated sauce. A light napping of brown butter or even a not-so-Italian pool of vegetable broth is all they require. She wraps up the Styrofoam trays of pasta in butcher paper and extracts a blood oath that you'll cook the pasta that evening.
Gambino and pasta go way back. When she was a teenager, her Italian-American parents reverse-emigrated, taking their kids to Italy, where she lived for several years. As a CNN field producer during the first Persian Gulf War, she often cooked pasta at the end of the day to reduce stress, even if it was on a hot plate in her hotel room.
Eventually she learned the pasta profession as an apprentice at L'Artigiano in Rome. This well-respected pasta shop supplies the best gourmet shops and caters events for the president of Italy. She also learned a little trick -- a way to twist one finger as she's folding the tortelloni to create a small interior ruffle and to position the tensile curl of the rim to best hold the sauce. That's the sign the pasta is handmade rather than machine-made. When you're an artisan, you want people to know your hands (even latex-gloved ones) have been on the product.
Gambino uses only organic eggs and flours (a mix of semolina, pastry flour and bread flour) as well as an imported sheep's-milk ricotta that has been enriched with fresh sheep cream.
And then she adds flavors. Maybe only a hint of lemon zest and nutmeg. Perhaps some Swiss chard or diced roasted asparagus.
She also prepares a couple that don't involve cheese. Porcini tortelloni gush with diced mushrooms and give off a woodsy fragrance as intense as truffle oil but a whole lot less annoying. Sweet potato and winter squash are gutsy, rustic mashes rather than overprocessed purees.
But for this home cook, the real revelation is Via Elisa's simple tagliatelle. The strand pasta is textured enough that sauce clings rather than slips off. It has bite but not a hint of springiness. And it tastes of fresh eggs. I don't think I can live without it; I just have to remember to order a day ahead of time.
Via Elisa. 1750-C Howell Mill Road, 404-605-0668. Stuffed pastas cost $15 per pound, strand pasta $7 per pound.
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