Restaurant Review: Spinasse

Can pasta be a form of art? Searching for perfection at Capitol Hill’s Spinasse

Upon walking into the modestly sized dining room at Spinasse (pronounced “Spee-NAH-say”), near the fashionable, gastronomically gifted 12th Avenue and Pike Street stretch of Capitol Hill, I felt like I’d been whisked away to an old Italian farmhouse—delicate lace curtains hang in the front windows, rough-hewn beams bear the soaring ceiling’s burden, and mismatched wood and marble countertops suggest a sense of history and an appreciation for the charms of imperfection. Creamy light flatters, and heavy, hand-built trestle tables—the long, dark, knotty sort that imply generations of suppers and oceans of wine have been consumed at them—fill the compact space. It’s easy to imagine Spinasse, the northern Italian restaurant opened by local pasta guru Justin Neidermeyer in August, has been serving platters laden with gossamer hand-formed ravioli since my grandmother was a newlywed.

Far from it.

Spinasse is one of Seattle’s latest “it” openings, a restaurant so hotly anticipated by fervent foodies that on one of my two visits—just four weeks after its opening—two food writers and a well-known local chef were in the house (and that’s only accounting for those I recognized). It’s also the latest example of a sea change in the sort of restaurants popping up all over our fair city. Like so many of the most-talked-about openings this year and last—How to Cook a Wolf, The Corson Building, Spring Hill—it’s a restaurant borne not from its owners’ latest market research on what concept might be hot right now, but rather of each chef’s quest for personal expression. It wasn’t always so: Remember the days when Seattleites could muster excitement over a Cheesecake Factory opening? This year, a Hard Rock Café is slated to open downtown, and nobody seems to care. It’s official: The Zeitgeist has shifted, and the hottest new restaurants in town are also the ones with the most soul.

Although his restaurant is new, Neidermeyer is no stranger to zealous food-loving locals. Many got their first tastes of his pastas at Café Juanita, where he was a member of owner/chef Holly Smith’s opening crew in 2000. He then departed for Italy to learn from the late legendary Piedmont pasta maker Cinto Albarello, returning stateside to make pastas and sell them at the Ballard farmers’ market. Foodie Web sites such as Chowhound and Egullet soon pinged with his fans’ colorful praise: “You’ve gotta taste this guy’s pasta. It’s out of this world.” His reputation grew through word of mouth and on the Web, ultimately earning him his current cult status. And then the big boys of the food press took notice: In July 2007, Neidermeyer was heralded in a Food & Wine article written by Seattle’s Michael Hebb (of One Pot and Pike Street Fish Fry), who called his pasta “insanely perfect.”

Now, at Spinasse, he’s created an artisan utopia, a place large enough to feel robust and familial during peak hours, but small enough that the fastidious chef can keep up with demand without sacrificing quality.

I’d anticipated my first dinner at Spinasse for weeks—I’d talked up the chef and his reputed pasta brilliance to my dinner dates, recounting the romantic details I’d read over the years (like how he’d stay up late in his loft above Capitol Hill’s Via Tribunali, honing his pasta-making skills and serving secret suppers to insiders—yours truly not included). By the time I walked into Spinasse for the first time, I was more familiar with Neidermeyer’s biography than that of my daughter’s school teacher. But I’d also been—without realizing it—drinking the Kool-Aid.