Peter Pastan - Owner-chef of Obelisk and 2Amys

2Restaurants: Pizza and prix-fixe

If you were to create a dream dinner party for Peter Pastan without his help, you might do well to invite Joni Mitchell (despite the fact that she’s old enough to be his mother — who is actually poet Linda Pastan). Add to the roster Hunter S. Thompson in his prime, Ben & Jerry before they sold, filmmakers the Coen brothers, and whoever at Piaggio designed the Vespa scooter: anyone offbeat who successfully broke the mold — you get the picture.

The owner chef of Obelisk and 2Amys lopes into his Macomb Street pizza spot looking like a college student at some laid-back New England university — which he was back at the end of the ‘70s, attending Bennington College in Vermont. He’s in jeans and sneakers, and his hair curls well below the collar of his floppy shirt.

After Bennington, Pastan was pondering becoming an architect, having worked for a couple in college. But he was “unemployable,” he says. He was “living in Boston, and I didn’t have a whole lot to do so I cooked, for myself and my girlfriend.” Then he found a job in Cambridge, Mass., selling pots and pans in a kitchen store. “Everyone there was interested in food.” And, increasingly, so was he.

In 1979 he went to Europe, spending a week or two with friends in London, then moving on to Paris for a while before traveling around Spain. He took a two-day train ride from Madrid to Rome, “and every time we crossed a border, the train crew would change. The French crew was miserable the entire time we were in France. Then in Italy, everyone relaxed, started drinking!”

The trip saw the birth of what became a passion for Pastan. “I traveled six weeks on a budget and fell in love with food.” And Italy.

The food interest gave him a job when he arrived back in the United States. “I had a friend who had a restaurant, so I got a job cooking lunch.”

He was self-taught, learning from Richard Olney cookbooks. “I was always a serious Richard Olney fan. Still am. He’s very compulsive and focused, generally insane, but he had a specific way of looking at food that made a lot of sense. Frankly, it still does.”

He thought briefly about going to cooking school. “But it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. After going through the course, I’d have to get a job cooking. But I already had a job cooking.”

In 1982, Pastan moved back to Washington, where, although born in New Haven, Conn., he had grown up from age 1 with an older brother and younger sister. He worked at the Tabard Inn for a year and a half, which he enjoyed. “The Tabard was very supportive, very nice.” But he wanted to run his own place. “I wanted not to have a boss. I wanted to do what I wanted. I don’t do well with authority figures. I don’t want anybody telling me what to do.”

He opened Obelisk on P Street in 1987, a place as laid-back as its owner-chef and offering a fixed-price menu. It caused a small revolution, showing it was possible to go out for some seriously fine dining without having to dress for the occasion or break the bank. “I guess Jean-Louis [Jean-Louis Palladin’s restaurant at the Watergate] was open then,” says Pastan. That was “the only other place with a prix-fixe menu. But theirs was super-expensive.”

Even today, two decades later, the restaurant fields questions about dress code. “We get a lot of phone calls, two or three a day, saying, ‘What do we have to wear?’” Pastan acts out the way the conversation plays: “‘Whatever you’re comfortable with.’ ‘Do I need to wear a jacket?’ ‘Whatever you’re comfortable with.’ ‘What will everyone else be wearing?’ Sometimes we say we’re happy to go shopping with them if they want ...” He flashes a grin.

Obelisk may have been one of the first of Washington’s restaurants to produce food that would be recognizable to a serious Italian gourmand and that focused on treating the best ingredients as simply as possible. But it’s not really a power-dining place, he says. “We’re very democratic in our approach to reservations. It doesn’t matter who you are, who your boss is, if you are the boss: If we’ve got a table, you can have it.”

At 2Amys, you can have a table if you’re prepared to line up for one. Named after his and his partner Tim Giametti’s wives, the pizzeria, which opened in October 2001, is so popular that pizza connoisseurs, families and people just out for a meal that feels like a holiday are happy to wait for a seat.

Pastan's determination to produce authentic Italian pizza has been recognized by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, which has distinguished his Marinara, Margherita and Margherita Extra pizzas as authentic with a certificate of Denominazione di Origine Controllata.

To understand how much of an accolade this is, consider that Parma ham, for instance, may be named as such only if the pig has been raised, aged and cured to the strictest regulations and standards, in a specific, restricted area of Italy.

Pastan, who used to co-own Pizzeria Paradiso, went to Naples one February with his wife, and he came back wanting to make a true pizza. “You have to use almost nothing in the dough,” he says.

When the place is packed and all the booster seats filled with children, the only inauthentic elementof 2Amys is the American English being spoken. But among the voices is a sprinkling of Italian from ex-pats delighted to have found a corner of Italy in the capital.

Obelisk (202-872-1180; no Web site) is located at 2029 P St. NW. The four-course fixed-price menu is $65. 2Amys (202-885-5700; http://www.2amyspizza.com) is located at 3715 Macomb St NW. Main courses cost $8.95 to $12.95.

This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the NorthWest Current newspaper. Photo Bill Petros/The Current