Oh, the pasta-bilities
by: Suzanne Sorrentino (The Advocate - June 6, 2004)

The chairs are stacked on top of the tables and the front of the house is dark when Maria Marchetti and her sister-in-law, Cenzina Parisi, start cracking eggs in the kitchen at Columbus Park Trattoria each morning.

On a typical Tuesday, they mix about 30 eggs into 12 pounds of flour - a blend of durum flour and semolina that Marchetti insits upon to bring out a pale amber hue and provide a toothy bite to her pasta.

The two women - each a little more than 5 feet tall, Marchetti in orange Puma sneakers and a white chef's coat, Parisi in a flower-print apron from home - work side by side in the cramped, narrow kitchen. They barely utter a word, so familiar to them is their work. Their hands flutter over the floured wooden board that tops the stainles steel work surface as one rolls the dough through a machine and the other cuts and shapes it.

Marchetti, who owns the Stamford restaurant with her brother, Michael Tarantino, breaks her concentration intermittently to offer a warm smile and answer a few questions.

Parisi is all work. There is a lot to get done on Tuesday mornings in the four hours before the rest of the kitchen staff arrives at 10 a.m. to begin prepping for lunch and dinner. After the weekend, they're low on most of their homemade pasta staples such as linguine, fettucine and pappardelle - the widest of the long noodles on the restaurant's menu(which are especially tasty with gamy meats such as wild boar, Marchetti says). Plus, they have to make fresh supplies of their specialty pastas - cavatelli, gnocchi and ravioli.

Marchetti and Parisi make the pasta five days a week for Columbus Park and the three other restaurants Marchetti and her brother operate: Applausi in Old Greenwich, Tarantino in Westport and Maria's Trattoria in Norwalk - Marchetti's first restaurant, which turned 20 this year.

The restaurant operation has grown over the decades (and continues to grow with Tarantino scouting locations for a new eatery in the Ukraine ), but at heart it remains a small business rooted in tradition and family.

When she was 10, Marchetti moved with her family to Stamford from Bari , a city on the Adriatic coast of southern Italy , known for fishing, agriculture and its trading port. Her father was a farmer and produced all the flour and olive oil the family used.

Marchetti's uncle, Giacomo Tarantino, owner of a grocery store in Stamford (which he later sold to the Cingari family, who turned it into a Grade A supermarkets), sponsored the family's move to America.

It was Marchetti's brother who first decided he wanted to get into the restaurant business, and Marchetti soon followed, opening Maria's Trattoria on Main Street in Norwalk in 1984. She would make the pasta for the restaurant in the mornings, and work on the floor during lunch. But she made sure she was home in time for her children to get out of school.

As the restaurant empire grew, so did the Marchetti's family. Marchetti and her brother opened Columbus Park in 1986 and Applausi and Tarantino in 1993 and 1994, respectively. Meanwhile, Marchetti had six children.

"As we went along and Cenzina came to help, then I was able to do a little bit more," Marchetti says. "And the kids were born in between."

Now, three of Marchetti's five sons work at the restaurants, as does her husband, Tony.

The food the restaurants serve is based on traditional recipes Marchetti grew up with. "We all learned form our moms. We learned from the crib, just from being around it all the time," she says.

Among the specialty pastas Marchetti and Parisi are making this Tuesday are cavatelli and ravioli filled with lobster and crab.

Parisi rolls the soft pasta dough through a machine into the long sheets that she cuts by hand into 4-inch squares for the ravioli. Marchetti dollops a teaspoon of filling onto each square and folds them into triangles, carefully sealing the two open sides. Then she places four triangles, points together to form a square, on a sheet of plastic and wraps them. The labor-intensive process keeps the pasta soft until it is cooked, she says.

When the women take out the cavatelli dough - made simply of flour and water - Marchetti says this shape is in high demand in her restaurants, served with a light tomato sauce or with broccoli rabe, garlic and olive oil.

"I think people would lynch me if I didn't have it," she says.

Marchetti rolls out the cavatelli dough with an old wooden rolling pin. She cuts the long pieces into 1 ½ inch strips and stacks a few on top of each other. Then she takes out her long chef's knife and deftly slices matchstick pieces about a quarter-inch wide.

Once the dough is cut, Marchetti and Parisi take their places side by side. They pick up the slivers of dough and rapidly roll each one under their middle fingers into a pasta curl.

"This you don't learn in a culinary institute. This you learn from your mother," Marchetti says.

She is starting to teach the technique to the younger members of her family. "This is an art: If they don't see it, it gets lost."

In these anti-carbohydrate days, Maria is defensive about pasta's healthful qualities. "We mix pasta in my household with broccoli, cauliflower, peas, broccoli rabe, and that's not fattening," she says. "There's just a little fat," she adds, and shows how she would drizzle just a small amount of extra-virgin olive oil in the shape of a cross over a pasta dish.

Though Marchetti spends hours, five days a week, making pasta in the restaurant's kitchen, that doesn't stop her from cooking a feast from family and friends at home every Sunday.

The restaurants are closed Sundays because she is a devout Catholic, and "Sunday is family day," Marchetti says.

Marchetti teaches catechism at St. John the Evangelist Church in downtown Stamford, and her youngest son, Alex, is taking confirmation classes. So on Sunday mornings, they attend church by 7:30 a.m. When they get home at about 11 a.m., Maria gets started preparing Sunday dinner.

"We do a big meal. There are never fewer than 12 people around the dinner table,: she says, glowing as she speaks of these gatherings. The crowd includes family and some of the many friends they have made over the years through the restaurants.

The three-course meals start with antipasti followed by pasta (often homemade) and then a roast - maybe veal or lamb.

"We tell her: 'Don't make (the pasta) all the time,'" her son, Michael, says.

But she hushes him with a wave of her hand. It's as if the restaurant and the family feasts aren't work for Marchetti, simply a joyous part of life.

"I'm a typical Italian, old-fashioned mother," Marchetti says proudly. "For me, it is, honestly, a labor of love."