Home Away From Rome By Phyllis C. Richman Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, February 28, 1999

"What have you liked here before?" one woman asked another, strangers making conversation to pass the time.

"The bread! The bread is wonderful!"

"What about the pastas? Which ones do you recommend?"

"I can’t remember what I ate, it was just all good."

That’s the kind of restaurant Pasta Mia is: a small pasta place where even if no one dish stands out, you leave with a sense of having been well fed – and probably with a bag of leftovers.

At last one of the women knocked tentatively, and the staff members at the rear table noticed they had visitors. One appeared at the door and turned the Closed sign to Open. He waved away the women’s apologies for having interrupted his dinner, and welcomed them heartily.

"Seat yourselves."

And they did, at small tables with red-checked cloths and bottles of olive oil – the ’90s substitute for the old-time candle in a raffia-wrapped wine bottle. Pasta Mia is a lighter, fresher update, but it’s a direct descendant of the red-sauce Italian restaurants where Americans learned to love spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, pizza and garlic bread. Not that Pasta Mia serves a single one of those.

The entrees are all pasta: linguine, fusilli, ravioli, penne, farfalle, capellini, tortellini, gnocchi and – the lone in-house product, which you can see hanging like clean laundry in the kitchen window – fettuccine, in three colors. The sauces are as simple as possible: Tomato. Cream. Cream with mushrooms. Cream with tomato. Tomato with red pepper. Red pepper and broccoli with garlic. Twenty-nine pasta dishes in all. Only nine of them have meat sauce (bolognese, ragu, carbonara, sausage or amatrice), and just three of them have seafood (clams, tuna or shrimp with tomato). The rest are vegetarian.

By the time the women had ordered wine, from a list where a mere $14 will bring a bottle of nice Tocai or Orvieto, they were feeling particularly fortunate. The place was filling up fast. There would be a line by the time their pastas arrived. There always is.

The remarkable thing is that nobody seems to mind waiting here. Coats get juggled and stuffed into corners; there’s no proper place to put them. The waiters – two or three at the most – squeeze through the crowd to deliver the big, deep plates of steaming pasta two at a time. Everyone here seems to know and accept the rules:

The food comes when it comes. Don’t expect the whole table to be fed at exactly the same time.

No substitutions. No, you can’t have fettuccine with pesto. That comes on the gnocchi. All pasta is served with cheese, even the seafood. Sometimes you get a lot, sometimes just a sprinkle. It’s the luck of the draw.

No carryout. You can take home your leftovers, but not a whole order of pasta.

The minimum food charge per person is $6.95. The maximum price for any pasta is $9.95. Which should help explain why people wait in line for this fresh and personable cooking.

The reason for all these rules is not just that high volume is necessary for such bargain-priced, made-to-order cooking. If you walk past the kitchen, you’ll see that it’s a one-man show. One man juggling dozens of pans at breakneck speed. I wouldn’t want to be the waiter to break his concentration with a plea for eggplant on the linguine instead of the fusilli.

The art to enjoying Pasta Mia is to bring a good companion or three. Share a plate of sheer prosciutto topped with a whole round of soft mozzarella, cut into slices, and savor how the salty ham plays against the unsalted cheese. Try the mozzarella with fragrant roasted red and yellow peppers. Or the roasted peppers with a whole school of tiny, pale gray alici – those wonderfully briny Italian anchovies. The Caesar salad shows no hint of egg, but it’s got plenty of anchovy and crisp croutons. And white beans come with fresh basil and remarkably flavorful grilled shrimp. All the beginnings are light, cool appetite-awakeners. And the craggy, crusty house-made bread, unsalted in the Italian style, is just right for swiping the plates clean of olive oil or vinaigrette.

The pasta sauces are far from the old-fashioned red sauce boiled down to a paste that will hold a spoon upright. These sauces are light and aromatic, with a hint of onion and fresh herb. If there’s garlic, it’s cooked to a soft, sweet state. Spicy red sauces have an attention-getting dose of red pepper, and the pesto is gutsy, but most of the sauces are gentle. They grow on you, unfold as you make your way through the big bowlful. My most lingering affection is for the green fettuccine with tomato-tinted cream sauce and fat slices of firm white mushroom. The acidity of the tomato cuts the richness, unlike the carbonara, which is richness untamed. The fusilli with broccoli is austere – just florets with oil, garlic and red pepper. It needs its cheese to knit the flavors. The fusilli with eggplant would be wonderful if the eggplant weren’t diced so finely, but it’s close enough.

I’ve never seen anybody but me order dessert here, and I can understand why. The choice is pedestrian chocolate-coated ice cream – tartufo – or a defrosted so-called tiramisu that looks and tastes like a party favor. The espresso is definitely more authentic.

Look around. The brick walls are decorated with nothing more than food posters. The chairs are meant for short stays. The tables are tight enough that your neighbor could drip red sauce on your tie – if you were clueless enough to wear one here. Yet tomorrow, when you’re scraping up the last bits of your leftover ravioli alla panna, you’ll probably be planning to try it with tomato sauce next time, and wondering whether you should have your roasted peppers with anchovies again or with mozzarella.

Pasta Mia – 1790 Columbia Rd. NW. 202/328-9114. Open: for dinner Monday through Thursday 6 to 10:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday 6 to 11 p.m. Closed Sunday. V, MC. No reservations. Smoking in bar area only. Prices: appetizers $3.50 to $7.95, entrees $6.95 to $9.95. Full dinner with wine, tax and tip $17 to $30 per person.

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