Rosemarino d’Italia in Alexandria: The next iteration of Italian American cooking?

Rosemarino d’Italia, an intimate Italian outpost in Del Ray, panders to a popular American bias: Fresh pasta always outperforms the dried stuff. As far as prejudices go, it’s a reasonable one. I mean, if freshly made dough works better for Mexican tortillas, it should do the same for Italian noodles, right?

Besides, according to our current thinking about restaurant cuisine, any ingredient that comes in a box and arrives via an 18-wheeler automatically carries the stench of evil. “Fresh” is the avenging angel, here to save us from the tyranny of American manufacturing that co-opted our food system from small farmers and our dear, talcum-powdered grandmothers who once prepared everything from scratch. Only the venal — or the feral — would reject fresh in favor of processed.

Rosemeri Espinoza, a native of Bolivia, is the owner and chef of Rosemarino d’Italia, an Italian restaurant in Alexandria’s Del Ray neighborhood. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)

Rosemeri Espinoza, owner and chef behind Rosemarino, is a Bolivian native who cut her teeth on Italian cooking at the Pines of Florence in Alexandria. She understands America’s obsession with fresh. Almost every day at her 48-seat restaurant, the kitchen prepares long slippery strands of spaghetti, small pillowy orbs of gnocchi, wide lengths of lasagna noodles and thin, delicate ribbons of linguine and fettuccine, each awaiting a sauce also prepared in house.

It’s a rare and often lovely experience, dining on these fresh noodles and such. It’s also, at times, overkill.

This is a tricky argument to make in an American dining culture that has rightly moved away from the can opener and the freezer case, but when it comes to pasta, fresh is not always better, or even the best choice. Just ask your nearest Italian ex-pat, who has no problem dumping pasta from a box into boiling, salted water. It’s often the Italian way.

One other thing to consider: As cookbook author Domenica Marchetti recently told me, preparing fresh pasta is both simple and complicated, procedural and intuitive. It relies on precious few ingredients, which must be manipulated, kneaded, rolled, cut and cooked with care, lest you wind up with noodles of no great distinction. Pasta dishes, after all, are supposed to be about those eggy strands curled up on the bottom of your bowl, not the sauce ladled on top.

At his best, Jose Castro, the guy who prepares the pastas at Rosemarino, can force you to put down your fork and contemplate the complex alchemy of Italian noodles. I’m thinking specifically about two of his pastas: the spaghetti at the base of Rosemarino’s signature bowl of shellfish swimming in a light, garlicky sauce, which pales in comparison to Castro’s toothsome strands, so fresh they taste as if they were plucked straight from nature, not produced in a prep kitchen. His fettuccine draped with Alfredo sauce offers different pleasures: thin, delicate, nearly translucent noodles that seem almost too fragile to ferry this decadent, nutmeg-heavy sauce.

The fresh pasta steals the spotlight from the shellfish and garlicky broth in Rosemarino d’Italia’s signature dish. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)

Okay, maybe Castro’s gnocchi can’t compare to the cumulus clouds over at Rose’s Luxury. But his potato poppers possess a personality all their own, both lush and lusty, their slight chew providing a palpable foil to the garlic-breath urgency of the bolognese. They’re not, in other words, the definitive dumplings, but they do the job asked of them.

I can’t say the same for the noodles neatly layered into the personal-sized pan of lasagna. The pasta sort of melts into the meat sauce and ricotta, contributing to the dish’s depth of flavor, but not its texture. It’s as if the fresh noodles absorb the characteristics of the surrounding ingredients, losing their own sense of form and identity in the process. They’re the Zeligs of pasta.

This disappearing act occurs on a semi-regular basis, even with pastas that previously demonstrated a passing familiarity with al dente texture. The spaghetti, for example, that provided just enough resistance in the signature Rosemarino dish, barely registers another time when tossed with bolognese and covered with fresh parmesan shavings. The same soft strands appear again in the house-made carbonara, stirred into an atypical sauce studded with onion, pancetta and a few herbs; neither the fresh spaghetti nor the carbonara hit the right notes.

Expect a similar rollercoaster ride when traversing other sections of the menu. One night, a lemon butter sauce over chicken Francese proves sharp enough to revive Mike Myers’s career; another night, when pooled around chicken picatta, the same sauce barely moves the needle on the Pucker-O-Meter. A white-wine variation on the lemon butter sauce goes down more like a jus-based gravy when paired with saltimbocca, which, I guess, is appropriate given that the dish comes with a side of mashed potatoes.

Two of Rosemarino’s best dishes are the overworked mules of Italian and Italian American eateries, easy to ignore while searching for more attractive options. Please don’t ignore them. The appetizer of fried mozzarella benefits from house-made cheese, the curds so fresh they taste as if the milk were clotted just minutes earlier. The finale of homemade tiramisu, drizzled with chocolate sauce and sprinkled with cocoa powder, has its own milky reward: a folded-in layer of half-and-half, which lends the dessert an airy, addictively light consistency.

Dine at Rosemarino often enough and you can’t help but notice how idiosyncratic its Italian cooking is, at once ambitious (those house-made pastas) and quirky (onions in carbonara, black olives in the lemon butter sauce). Its approach would seem to be the next phase of Italian American cooking: the cuisine as seen through the eyes of a South American immigrant who adopted Italian cooking as her own.