THE ZEN OF
Pasta One of the nation’s best new chefs, Douglass Williams, extols the simple pleasures of a timeless culinary tradition
T
S TORY BY A M Y T R AV ERSO | PHOTOS BY MICH A EL PI A Z Z A
he pastry and pasta station at Mida Lower Roxbury. Since Mida opened in 2016, its dining restaurant in Boston is a small, tidy, dimly lit room has stood out as one of the most diverse in the corner carved out of a subterranean kitchen. city, a frustratingly rare phenomenon in Boston. So When chef-owner Douglass Williams stands with customers to feed, interviews to grant, and Covid at the counter where he makes his doughs, precautions to devise, Williams finds his problem now there’s perhaps eight inches between his is not struggling to survive as much as it is learning how head and the ceiling. Across the room, the to juggle it all. He is a warm person, a born nurturer, commercial dishwasher clatters; line cooks bound up but his brain is always in fifth gear, solving logistical and down the stairs. But this spot is a sanctuary, the puzzles, putting out fires, scouting new opportunities. calm amid the storm of a busy restaurant. The pasta kitchen is where he finds his peace. Of all the years for a chef to achieve national Cooking, like sports or dance, is an embodied recognition, 2020 ended up being Williams’s. Last May, profession. Spatial awareness is critical—in how Food & Wine named him one of the country’s 10 best you move in a tiny kitchen, or position meat on a new chefs, calling Mida “a crowded grill. Then there’s the temple to carbohydrates.” It muscle and sense memory of sang the praises of Williams’s working with dough. The brain pasta craft, which he learned downshifts. “The whole outside at culinary school in his world beyond the table just home state of New Jersey but disappears,” he says. “You’re mastered while working his trying to have your fingertips way up through such kitchens read the pasta and act as your as Boston’s award-winning eyes. All that has a meditative Coppa and Radius restaurants. quality. I don’t outsource the With the Food & Wine nod, pasta making, because the a good-news-starved media reason I opened Mida is that phalanx beat a path to his I wanted to teach pasta. To Chef Williams gives Amy a lesson in making gnocchi during door. And though quarantine please people and to make her visit to his restaurant, Mida, on Weekends with Yankee. and temporary closures hit the people feel welcomed. It’s the bottom line, Mida was lucky need to make something that enough to have its neighborhood rally around it, even comes from my hands and from my heart.” before the rest of the country took an interest. For a recent feature in Yankee magazine, Williams shared Mida sits on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and recipes designed with both pasta newbies and experienced Tremont Street, which puts it between two economically cooks in mind. You’ll find one of our favorites, Ricotta and racially distinct neighborhoods: the South End and Gnocchi Cacio e Pepe, on page 28.
26 WEEKENDS WITH YANKEE INSIDERS’ GUIDE
