You probably never tasted a dish of pasta Bolognese like the one chef Douglass Willliams is making at his restaurant, MIDA, in the South End. It's creamy and silky, as if the short, chubby tubes of paccheri have been glazed with sauce. Williams is using all pork, which he simmers with preserved garlic ("it's amazing and pleasing, without being pungent," he says) and splashes of vinegar and fresh oregano. He pulls al dente pasta out of the water before it's ready and adds it to the deeply flavored sauce with pasta cooking water, Parmesan, slivers of slightly bitter broccoli rabe, and another hit of vinegar to brighten it. Then he cooks it down until the pasta is done and has absorbed some of the sauce. He sprinkles the top with toasted breadcrumbs.
It's dazzling. So is all of Williams's food.
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In the July issue of Food & Wine, where he was named one of the 10 Best New Chefs in America, he's called a "pasta wizard." Writer Khushbu Shah says the Boston chef "is a master of texture, almost at a molecular level."
Mangia Pasta Monday ($35 per person) is a good night to sample what MIDA is up to and pop in for an all-you-can-eat homemade pasta menu. In-house, you get pasta one dish at a time till you can’t do it anymore. You can also take out Mangia Monday; the restaurant prefers that you order for two (which really serves three). Five pasta dishes came in my take-out curbside order, with salad and bread. Each is a study in texture and taste.
Snail-shaped lumache is tossed with a pesto sauce the kitchen invented because Williams was worried about customers with nut allergies; he’s had his own medical battles and takes them seriously. The cooks set out canned garbanzo beans to dry, then toast them in the oven until they turn dark tan. They’re crispy but not hard and happen to have the same consistency as nuts, he says. “It’s a cool ingredient.”
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I also twisted strands of bucatini all'amatriciana around my fork, the pasta tossed with a long-simmered tomato sauce made with the cured pork jowl guanciale, pepper, sherry vinegar, white wine, and some of the house-cured garlic.
There was creamy Roman-style gnocchi cacio e pepe, which highlights the feathery puffs with little more than grated cheese, butter, and pepper. And a short-rib lasagna you'll dream about, with the thinnest pasta sheets, fontina, and a little tomato sauce.
Every person you talk to at MIDA is gracious, which Williams says his Syrian-Lebanese mother taught him. “We’re wearing masks and trying to feel personable,” he says, “trying to maintain the hospitality.” As for his generosity, the chef has been known, pre-Covid, to take a tray of biscotti outside and hand them out to construction workers in the area. “We’re trying to make friends,” he says. “If the restaurant were a friend, it’s someone who doesn’t come empty-handed to the party.”
782 Tremont St., South End, Boston, 617-936-3490, www.midaboston.com. Mangia Pasta Monday goes online Monday at mid-afternoon.
Sheryl Julian can be reached at sheryl.julian@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @sheryljulian.
July 02, 2020 at 10:14PM
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In the South End, Mangia Pasta Monday is a huge hit - The Boston Globe
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