A Mano

A Mano at 1677 Wisconsin Avenue NW is an Italian restaurant at the upper end of the Georgetown Wisconsin Avenue commercial corridor, near the transition from the Georgetown commercial district to the Glover Park residential neighborhood. The name A Mano, which is Italian for by hand, signals the restaurant’s approach to the Italian culinary tradition: the pasta made by hand on the kitchen’s wooden board, the bread made by hand in the kitchen’s oven, and the cooking that treats the manual technique as the foundation of the food’s quality.

Italian cooking in the a mano tradition centers on the handmade pasta that the Italian kitchen has developed across its twenty regional traditions. The sfoglia, which is the thin rolled-out pasta sheet made from flour and eggs by a pastry board and rolling pin, is the foundation of the pasta fresca tradition that produces the tagliatelle, the pappardelle, and the filled pasta shapes of tortellini, ravioli, and cappellacci. In the Bologna tradition, the egg pasta is rolled thin enough to see the hand through it when held up to the light, which is the technical benchmark for the sfoglina’s skill.

The Wisconsin Avenue address at 1677 is at the commercial end of Georgetown’s shopping and dining corridor, in the block closest to the Glover Park boundary that the neighborhood’s commercial activity reaches. The upper Wisconsin position gives A Mano a neighborhood character appropriate to the Italian restaurant: the regular customer who walks from the surrounding blocks rather than the tourist navigating the main commercial strip.

The Italian wine list accompanies the handmade pasta with the regional wines that the Italian culinary tradition has always paired with its food: the Piedmontese Barbera and Nebbiolo with the egg pasta of Turin and Alba.

Hours run Tuesday through Sunday from 5pm or 5:30pm. The Italian culinary tradition’s emphasis on the handmade is not simply a marketing preference but a genuine quality distinction: the handmade pasta that A Mano produces has a different texture and a different surface than the extruded pasta that the machine produces, and the difference is apparent in the way the sauce adheres to the pasta’s surface and in the bite of the finished noodle. The egg pasta that the Italian fresh pasta tradition uses, with the specific flour and egg ratio that produces the elastic and workable dough, achieves its texture through the physical process of kneading and rolling rather than the mechanical compression that the pasta machine applies. The upper Wisconsin Avenue address at 1677 puts A Mano in the commercial section that serves the residential communities of upper Georgetown and Glover Park, which are the neighborhoods that walk to the restaurant rather than arriving by car. The neighborhood Italian restaurant at this address serves the regular customer who returns for the specific pasta preparation that the kitchen makes best, in the way that the Italian-American restaurant tradition has always operated at its best. The wine list at A Mano covers the Italian regional wines that the handmade pasta tradition pairs with: the Verdicchio with the seafood pasta, the Barbera with the meat ragu, and the Soave with the lighter cream preparations. Hours run Tuesday through Sunday from 5pm or 5:30pm.