S e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 7 8 1 ly opened the Corner Room, with an Italian menu featuring such pastas as pappardelle and bucatini made on the premises. And to- day, the bar for authentic Italian pasta in this city has never been higher. BACK COVE SUPER FINE “All of our pastas are handmade by our morn- ing prep guru, Camille,” says chef Mike Smith at Tipo on Ocean Avenue. “She has what we refer to in the business as ‘pasta hands.’ She does a killer job. We use different flours and combinations of flours for each pasta. We like super fine pasta flour, semolina, and rye flour. The gnocchi are both potato- and ricotta- based, with some flour and egg.” “W e have an electric pasta roll- er made in Italy to roll out the sheets. The fazzoletti (hand- kerchiefs) and the garganelli (tubular quills) are cut with a “bicycle” cutter, with five small- wheel blades that can be [adjusted] and locked into place. The spaghetti is cut on a chitarra. The corzetti (flat circles) are hand-stamped with a custom corzetti stamp from Florence.” We find Camille Mann making pasta in Tipo’s spotless kitchen one recent morning. A restaurant veteran who’s worked at Fore Street, Hugo’s, Eventide, and Pai Men Miyake, she moves with practiced, economical mo- tions at a broad stainless counter. She sends a long, wide band of pasta dough through the electric roller several times, after which she lays it out on the flour-dusted counter. “This is a garganelli board.” She sets down a wooden board less than a foot square. It’s surface is carved with tiny parallel ridges. “Wood enhances the texture of the pasta, and rigates carry the sauce better.” A couple of passes of the bicycle cutter over the sheet of dough turn it into neat two-inch squares. Working quickly, she rolls each square diag- onally onto a thin dowel over the garganelli board. Voilà–ridged tubes with a quill point at each end. In a couple of minutes, she’s heaped a drying tray with a slew of them. “Right now, we serve these with lamb sugo. In the spring, it was spring peas and scallions.” She pulls a brick of bright red dough from the cooler. “Corzetti dough–we put beet pow- der and a little wine in it.” Another long sheet is rolled out and cut into lengths which are placed on a wooden board and punched into circles about the circumference of a golf ball, using the ring piece of the corzetti stamp. She uses the floured stamp piece to imprint each red circle with Tipo’s motorcycle logo. “We’ll