Pian Pianino's Perfect Pasta
At the Ballard Market on Ballard Ave
Sundays 10-4

In the food world, there are Restless Cooks and there are Process Cooks.

The Restless Cooks-including me-can't wait to create new dishes. We find nothing more tedious than completing essential everyday tasks. On workdays we say to ourselves, "Do I really have to chop parsley again?" The Restless Cook lives for specials.

Then there are the Process Cooks, those single-minded few who dedicate their lives to perfecting one dish. No great sushi chef bitches about having to cut yet another slice of yellowtail. No seasoned barbecue cook gets bored with ribs. For these guys, the kitchen is a place of constant refinement, a place where they strive for a never-quite-realized perfection. They say, "How can I make this batch of chopped parsley better than the last?" For Process Cooks, a special that's on the menu for just one night is a torment.

At 27, with a brown beard grizzling up his baby face, Justin Neidermeyer seems to be a little young to be a Process Cook. But as he shows me his pasta workshop, adorned with bronze cutters and maps of Italy, his grin suggests that he's happy to spend the rest of his life making each batch of pasta better than the last.

Most nights, from 9:00 p.m. to midnight, after cooking dinner for the wealthy family that employs him, Neider-meyer shuts himself in a room with little more than flour, eggs, and a few hand tools. He doesn't come out until he has wrestled those ingredients into sinuous, hand-cut tajarin, plump ravioli, or ridged garganelle. He's a little nuts about pasta, he admits, infatuated with the spring of well-kneaded dough and its cool touch as it emerges from the pasta rollers. The pasta even speaks to him. "There is a slight banter between your mind and the product," says Neidermeyer.

When I visited his workshop, Neider-meyer served me a few samples: beet ravioli with a shocking pink interior, and then the tajarin coated first with simple sage butter, and then a light lamb sauce. I too can imagine having a late-night conversation with such fetching, eggy noodles.

I first sampled Neider-meyer's pasta when he worked at the fabulous Cafe Juanita, but recently he has become one of several talented cooks finding their bliss outside the restaurant world, where the need for speed and profits often crowds out perfection. Though his primary source of income is his private cooking gig, he seems to have found his niche in the languid weekend world of farmers' markets. He shares a booth at the Ballard Market with his buddy, Jeremy Faber (a mushroom forager and former Herbfarm sous chef), where he sells his pasta in pretty little cellophane packets.

How did this Washington pasta boy get so single minded? He's cooked in some really good Seattle kitchens, but it was a year in the Piedmont region of Italy braising rabbits and observing restaurant veterans, particularly his guru Cinto Albarello, that turned him into a fanatical Process Cook. I've seen this before. Cooks head off to Italy and come back stripped of irony, completely in the thrall of the Italian good life. Nothing in America is pure enough for them anymore. Their reverence can be tiresome but their food is often splendid.

Neidermeyer has a big production mixer but it was on the fritz when I dropped by. He frankly seemed a little relieved. "I had a huge moral battle with myself to be able to say I'm okay with it," he says. Every step in making pasta, he says, has an ethical component. He's constantly asking himself, "Am I making pasta with the same care as the old pros in Piemonte?" The mixer, he reckoned, is an acceptable extension of his muscle power, but for the time being it sits motionless on the floor.

So without it, Neidermeyer demonstrates his method, and just for fun gives me a batch to make myself. He moves like an athlete, using his whole body to knead the flour and egg yolks together, waving a six-foot scarf of pasta in the air to flick off excess flour. I've made a fair amount of pasta, but always with a mixer, and my batch is a lumpy mess. I clumsily prod my dough this way and that until I give up and let Neidermeyer finish my work. It's all right by me-after all why should a Restless Cook make pasta by hand when there's a thoroughly devoted Process Cook in the kitchen? ■