Whitney Pipkin
Maribel Salamanca gets a little miffed when the morning deliveries start arriving through a backdoor at Hank’s Pasta Bar in Alexandria, letting in a blast of cold, dry air.
“It dries it out,” she says, laying a damp towel across a long pasta sheet she’s carefully forming into pods of duck confit ravioli.
As one of two so-called ‘Pasta Mamas’ — whose hands form every piece of homemade pasta on the menu — Salamanca’s allowed to request some peace and quiet in her corner of the kitchen. After all, she’s been working in this kitchen longer than anyone else in the building.
“She came with the restaurant,” says Thomas Palmer, executive chef at the pasta bar on North Saint Asaph Street.
An Italian restaurant before that, Salamanca, 45, has worked at this location for 18 years. And the ‘Pasta Mama’ nickname is especially fitting for her: three of her seven children also work in the same restaurant.
A year ago, Ingrid Lopez-Amador joined the team as an equally efficient pasta maker whose “tortellini skills blew me out of the water,” says Palmer. “On gnocchi, she skated right by me.”
The pair of Latina immigrants do the work of at least three people in a fraction of the time and, Palmer says, form the backbone of the family eatery. The restaurant had to get a larger pasta extruder to keep up with the women’s productivity.
“They’re basically the heart and soul of this restaurant,” he says.
Salamanca typically works days and focuses on forming long strands of fettucine, ribbons of pappardelle and thin spaghetti for the menu.
Lopez-Amador’s forte is the stuffed and rolled pastas, such as tortellini, gnocchi and orecchiette. She comes into the restaurant around 4 p.m. after attending school in the morning to begin her work.
Both women usually tell the chef once they think they’ve made enough pasta. After watching the mounds of dough turn into tidy portions all day, they have an eye for how much is needed for a Monday service versus Saturday’s.
When the restaurant renovates an upstairs space in the spring, Palmer says they plan to make a space exclusively for Salamanca and Lopez-Amador’s pasta making — far away from that breezy backdoor.
Diners can get a better taste for the Mamas’ work by turning the hand-formed pasta into their own dishes during a new Family Style Sundays program at Hank’s. Starting at $60 for four people, diners can try their hand at adding sauces and toppings to fettuccine, mafalde, spaghetti, or casarecce over a three-course meal.
