Pâtes Fraîches pushes past the red sauce set

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

Circle a block or two in the East Village and you’re bound to pass by at least a few empty windows. It starts slowly, but it’s a vacant trend that grows at each turn, corner shops and cafes blocked out by butcher paper and leasing offers. But Pâtes Fraîches, a two-month-old spot holding together the corner of First and Elm, aims for everything the East Village longs to be, dressed with the kind of artistic promise that still struggles to find its way into the neighborhood.

Conceptually, Pâtes Fraîches cooks towards the artisan label, a restaurant singularly focused on the daily craft of rolling out fresh, organic pastas. The place keeps an artistic aesthetic, too, backed by exposed brick and centered around a wall striped with crisp oranges, pale violets and sunny yellows—it’s like a color wheel dissected into wallpaper. Even the restaurant’s logo has an artistic edge, with what appears to be tangled threads of pasta spun together like the edible equivalent of a Pollock painting.

Although Pâtes Fraîches focuses almost exclusively on perfecting pastas, there are a few other directions to steer your meal. For one, you can stack together starters, pairing the spring salad (topped with poached wild salmon) with the soup du jour (a classic potato leek on those days when the calendar and your appetite align). You can even start with a steamed artichoke served whole for the stripping.

Also paired with the pastas is a brief beer and wine list. Pâtes Fraîches only offers two beers, but the sampling is a smart one, opting for a couple of craft brews that cost no more than $2.75. The better of the duo is Dixie’s Blackened Voodoo Lager, an amber brown beer once hobbled by Hurricane Katrina but back now as the brewery rebuilds its once-stunted supply.

But the draw of Pâtes Fraîches is, of course, its pastas. Here, the restaurant boils its doughs down from their purest forms, started from organic rice, rye, wheat, barley, buckwheat and chestnut flours. The restaurant even goes so far as to stake its name (“fresh pasta” in French) on these very dishes.

So it’s to high expectations that Pâtes Fraîches generally delivers. The restaurant’s rye fettuccine is excellent, mixed with slivers of Virginia ham, zucchini and a handful of gruyère all tossed together in a white wine and sour cream sauce. Unlike most cream-based pasta plates, the fettuccine never sits too heavy, lightened by the sour cream and buoyed by the noodles themselves, airy things that unsurprisingly out-eat their boxed counterparts.

For the purest of the lighter eats, however, there’s the rice gemelli, delicate corkscrews of pasta accompanied by mushrooms and asparagus in a nearly nonexistent gruyère cheese sauce. Although the sauce is a light one, it’s not a fault—the dish succeeds in its simplicity.

Maybe it’s just a result of its two-month tenure, but Pâtes Fraîches also has its missteps. When last I ordered the chestnut pappardelle (with roasted duck and Portobello mushrooms), the plate suffered what must’ve been a last-minute mix-up, tossed with prunes and onions, two ingredients of the neighboring buckwheat rigatoni. The pasta wasn’t pappardelle, either, as the plate traded the fat, fettuccine-like strands for curls of what was apparently the buckwheat rigatoni, creating a cross-pasta combination that didn’t eat nearly as well as the two dishes do on their own. Then there’s the fact that with only six different entrees at Pâtes Fraîches, you can’t help but want a bit more variety, something to occasionally take your mind off the starchy strings hanging from your fork.

The restaurant thankfully counters that with a rotating selection of desserts (a weightless chocolate mousse and a perfectly cool pear clafoutis on my stops) that delivers a worthwhile divergence from the pastas. But it’s those pastas that Pâtes Fraîches has wrapped its image around—and it usually works well, pushing the definition of the typical pasta dish well past the red sauce set. And so the restaurant’s singularity allows it to at least sit confidently in its corner spot, a place dead-set on its identity at a time when the neighborhood needs some certainty.

PÂTES FRAÎCHES 400 E FIRST ST | LONG BEACH 90802 | 562.437.2222 | PATESFRAICHESRESTAURANT.COM | OPEN TUES-SUN | CALL FOR HOURS | FOOD FOR TWO $30-50

Tags: East Village, Food, Long Beach, pasta, pates fraiches