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ALUMNI STORIES she shared, “and one night I remember the chef caught me and said, ‘You want to work pasta, don’t you?’ because I was just staring and taking it all in. So I remember him catching me watching in awe of the whole thing…. He saw my love of pasta in my eyes, and he put me on the pasta station.” With the help of the sous chefs and Leta’s diligence, she was able to master her art at a professional level. Fast-forward to a move back to Portland, getting married, raising two boys, and Leta then found herself engaging with the pasta-making world through Instagram. Seeing what other people did inspired her to share her own creativity with the medium. As fate would have it, a cooking store opened up right near her home, and she was asked to teach pasta-making classes on-site. Through social media entrepreneurship in the Instagram community and her connections through hosting local pasta-making classes and networking, Leta has continued to build her small business in recent years. While she would have spent a good amount of the year traveling to host workshops, due to COVID, she has reinvented and adapted her business model to offer digital cooking classes through the popular Patreon website and selling pasta from her (state certified) home kitchen.
Pasta Leta: A Passion for Pasta — Leta Merrill ’00 Leta Merrill’s journey to the culinary arts was not a direct one, but began with a love of cooking—and enjoying lots of pasta. Ask her mother and she will tell you that Leta and pasta were meant to be, even from a young age. After studying elementary education in college, she ended up enrolling in the Oregon Culinary Institute in Portland with great enjoyment. Leta soon found herself with a fast-paced, hands-on learning experience at the Union Square Cafe in New York City, honing her craft. What started as an internship and slicing bread soon became a full-time job preparing oysters and salads, but Leta still dreamed of pasta. “I could see the pasta station from where I was working,”
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While most of us buy the dried, machine-made packaged pasta at the grocery store, everything Leta makes is hand-shaped from scratch. While she can make multi-colored ravioli to orecchiette to pasta varieties you probably haven’t heard of, when asked for her favorite, Leta would say a simple cacio e pepe: toasted peppercorns and pecorino cheese. Her favorite way to cook, however, depends on what’s in season, selecting whatever looks best at the farmers market that day which she learned back in New York at her first restaurant job. “It’s kind of how the Italians approach cooking,” she said. “The chef taught me a lot about seasonal cooking and how to build a pasta sauce with whatever you have on hand. There’s a basic formula to building the sauce and executing it. Once you have the formula down, you can exchange ingredients as much as you’d like.” Once quarantines are lifted, Leta looks forward to hosting her pasta-making workshops and traveling to (of course) Italy, sampling different specialties from each region. In the meantime, you can still enjoy her mouth-watering delights online and watch her business grow at @lemneats!
