The Pasta Queen of Tom Douglas' World Is Taking a Big Leap Across Town

Photo by Leslie Kelly

Martha Francis with a batch of her famous plin, served at Palace Kitchen.

​Martha Francis has been cranking out some of Seattle's finest pasta for nearly 14 years, uber-efficiently in a small space in the kitchen at Palace Kitchen. If you've eaten pasta at a Tom Douglas restaurant, you've sunk your teeth into Martha's terrifically toothsome pasta. But soon she'll be moving on up to Cuoco, Tom's new Italian place on Terry Avenue, where she'll be working in a dazzling display kitchen. After settling into her routine for so many years at Palace, this is a bold step, yes, but one that will surely make Martha the more visible superstar she deserves to be.

SW: What does this move mean to you?

Martha: Terror! I've been in the same place doing the same thing contentedly for so long, and I don't really like change. But now that I've been working with Stuart Lane, the new chef, I'm excited and learning a lot of classic techniques. Can't wait to see more. Haven't been out to the new place yet, but we are planning a field trip soon.

When did you start working for Tom?

I was hired the week before The Palace opened in 1996, and for about the first nine months split my time between making plin at the Palace and working the pantry at Etta's, though few people remember my time there anymore.

What happens during your typical day?

After cleaning my station and getting some coffee and any new gossip, I make a batch of pasta. Its size ranges from 6 pounds of flour with 20 whole eggs and 30 yolks to 14 pounds of flour and 40 eggs and 50 yolks. After I have the dough resting, I do prep. This can mean cooking pork shoulder, peeling and roasting vegetables, or turning milk into ricotta, among other things. About 11 a.m., I start rolling pasta. In the midst of all this, I am also answering phones, directing visitors, and signing for deliveries. With the corporate office above us, we get a number of interesting things coming through. Cases labeled "perishable" from all over the country and the world. Last week, an antique rocking horse arrived. What Tom is doing with that, I don't know.

Do you keep track of pasta? Have you rolled a million miles worth?

I don't keep track on a daily basis, but I can come up with an approximation pretty quickly. I've worked five days a week, 50 weeks a year for 14 years this March. If I roll pasta 6 hours a day, that's something like 21,000 hours of pasta rolling. In one hour, I roll about 15 yards of pasta, so that's 315,000 yards, so divide that by the number of yards in a mile and you have the number of miles of pasta I've rolled, more or less. I'm a little disappointed by the number--I think surely I must be in Chicago by now, but I'm not even out of Washington state. For pounds, it would be 28,000 pounds. So nowhere near a million.

Is making pasta second nature, or do you have to think about it?

If I try to think about it, I can't do it. That's how much a part of my nature it's become. Now that I've been training with someone new, I'm having to slow down and think about what exactly it is I'm doing and explain how to make the dough do what it's supposed to do and why I do things the way I do. This is a challenge.

Check back for part two of this week's Grillaxin Q&A with pasta queen Martha Francis.