Henry Jenrri squirts a small amount of spinach filling in groups of four across the dough. “After a while you just know where to put it.” Shirley L. Ruhe
Flour sprayed through the air as Chef Henry Jenrri sprinkled the metal ravioli mold before spreading the sheet of pasta over the top. He filled each indentation with spinach filling, folded the large sheet of pasta over the top and pressed the rolling pin back and forth to separate the raviolis. "Whoops this one didn't come apart. I get flour everywhere.” Jenrri has been working at A La Lucia on Madison Street in Old Town for 10 years. He came to D.C. from Las Vegas looking for a job and started as a dishwasher at Galileo. "But I'm a hard worker and in three months I was working the grill. I also learned prep and salad and saw how pasta was made."
Jenrri is in charge of the kitchen at A La Lucia, which means he manages the workers, helps those with questions on how to make something, decides on the menu and makes a number of the dishes. For instance, "today we're having fettuccini with fresh spinach, cherry tomatoes and goat cheese. We had a lot of cherry tomatoes so I had to decide how to use them. I worked with the owner to come up with to tonight's special. Most of the recipes are mine — we do the simple stuff, not the fancy part."
In addition, Jenrri usually works the pasta line and makes many of the fillings for the stuffed varieties. He plans for the week on Sunday, has his day off on Monday and arrives at 2 p.m. other days to begin preparing for that night's menu. "Tonight we have a party of 20; the 19 degree weather didn't stop them from coming."
Everyone has a different idea on how to make good pasta. "I use five eggs to a pound of flour and some oil and salt. The oil for me is more soft for working. Otherwise it is too dry. At first you experiment around to see but then you get it and do it the same." He threads a two-foot piece of dough through the pasta machine over and over again; each time the pasta gets thinner and longer until his arms stretch to hold it.
Any difficult dishes? "Osso buco, the chopping I'm used to, but the cooking to get the flavor is the hard part, the right amount of spices and love. And the focaccia. I made about 1,000 recipes to get the focaccia we have now," he says pointing to a large tray of Italian bread on the other side of the kitchen.
He says that when he started they didn't have any fresh specialties. "Then I started to build. Today we like to make everything fresh and use it the same day. He opens the large door of the refrigerator and pulls out the agnolotti nestled just above the curls of black and white squid linguine. "This will be with shrimp, scallops and clams. My favorite is most of the pasta. I especially like the spicy ravioli." Jenrri says customer favorites change but now it seems to be the veal raviolini or the gnocchi in cream sauce. In 2010 he went to school at Galleria in D.C. "It was the basics but things I didn't know. I had learned in different restaurants and been cooking things that tasted good but the course told me why it worked."
He didn't grow up eating Italian food. "I am from Honduras and I loved my mother's food. I think everyone likes what his mother makes best. No one could make tamales