It's Saturday night, and you are having dinner out. As you peruse the menu, the pasta special catches your eye.

At Restaurant A: Tender Homemade Ravioli with Lobster, Crabmeat, Basil, Ricotta and Parmesan.

At Restaurant B: Ricotta Ravioli, Sweet Pea Puree, Preserved Lemon and Watercress.

		More to come When his Web site is up and running, Mr. Salvi will sell his homemade pasta to the public. The address is fedepasta.com. He plans to include fresh and frozen pastas. In the meantime, he can be reached at 724-689-2176.

At Restaurant C: Fresh Herb Fettuccine tossed with Sauteed Wild Mushrooms, Onions, Garlic and Rosemary in a Sherry Parmesan Cream Sauce.

One would think each pasta was the creation of restaurant kitchens A, B, or C. But one would be wrong.

Steve Salvi, a chef and artisanal pasta maker, makes much of Pittsburgh's restaurants' fresh pasta. He crafts it in his small operation in North Huntingdon and delivers to some of the area's top eateries. Want some? Sorry, but you won't find it in retail outlets. Mr. Salvi's business is strictly wholesale.

His client list reads like a Who's Who of chefs: Alan Peet at Casbah in Shadyside, Jeff Iovino at Iovino's in Mt. Lebanon, Jason Sicher at Enrico's in Shadyside, Joseph Tambellini at Joseph Tambellini's in Highland Park, Keith Fuller at Six Penn Downtown, Joseph and Jennifer Mico at Pino's in Point Breeze, Mark Swomley at The Carlton Downtown, Donato Coluccio at Capital Grille Downtown, Ernie Vallozzi at Ernie Vallozzi's in Greensburg, the family at Girasole in Shadyside and Greg Alauzen at soon-to-open Cioppino in the Strip District. Add to that some corporate catering and country clubs.

Mr. Salvi doesn't drop off random boxes of spaghetti. He customizes every pasta to order.

"Some of my best clients are the 40-to-60 seaters," he says. "These chefs care about product but don't have the time or the manpower to make their own pasta.

"My business is built on a chef-to-chef relationship," he continues. "My chefs usually call on Monday. They might say 'I'm thinking of this cheese, that vegetable, this herb or that sauce.' Then we talk until we find just the right direction and customize their pasta. For something like a wine dinner, maybe a chef will want, say, a beet gnocchi. My pasta always is a complement to the chef's embellishment or special dish."

Mr. Salvi started his artisanal pasta business in 2005. But he took the long way 'round. "I graduated from Pitt with a major in accounting and business. But I didn't like sitting behind a desk," he says. "I took an evening job at Morton's, working in the pantry.

"Then I went to Lidia's Pittsburgh, working lunch under Chris Juliano, the opening chef. He covered most of the stations, including making the pasta. I'm Italian, and I grew up eating good food. But it was while working at Lidia's for a year that I learned to appreciate simplicity."

When the saucier, Seth Tricher, left Lidia's to take the chef's gig at Downtown's La Strada, he took Mr. Salvi with him as sous chef, where part of his job was ordering provisions for the restaurant. He didn't like any of the pasta product that was coming in, and, after trying them all, he decided to make the pasta himself.

"I'd go down to the basement away from the noise and hassle of the kitchen and work making pasta by hand for four or five hours. My chef's specials were so popular, they'd sell out in 20 minutes.

"Finally, I reasoned that I could work 100 hours for somebody else or work 100 hours for myself. If you're going to work, you better do something you love. And I love to make pasta. I put in my time in restaurant kitchens, and I was ready to go out on my own. Most important to me, though, I wanted to have more time to spend with my family." When Mr. Salvi uses that oft-used phrase, he means it.

There was the workroom to set up and prep kitchen to customize, while dealing with myriad details. By October 2005, he was ready to produce.

In the beginning, all of his pastas were handmade and hand-cut and all fillings were piped from a pastry bag. As the business has grown, he has added commercial machines from Italy. Now he makes stuffed and extruded or hand-cut flat pastas. He can roll a sheet of fresh pasta 16 inches wide by 6 feet long. He and his right-hand-man, Paul Mularski, make about 1,000 pounds of pasta a week from local eggs and flour imported from Naples. "Other than the special flour, I try to use as much fresh and local product as I can," says Mr. Salvi, who is a member of the Slow Food movement.

He doesn't market or advertise. On his delivery route, he hears about new places opening and sees where places are changing hands.

"I just take along an extra box or two of fresh pasta on my deliveries," he says. "I knock on the door, hand a box of pasta to the chef and say 'Try this. Call me if you like it.'" In this try-it-you'll-like-it scenario, the chefs check out the pasta, and if it's a good fit for their menu, a new relationship is born.

One of his first clients was Eric Wallace, back when he was executive chef at Casbah. Chef Wallace is now at Lidia's, where Mr. Salvi learned how to make pasta. "Steve is one of the most sincere people that I have ever met," Chef Wallace says. "He makes great pasta and has a deep understanding and love for what he does."

Ah, but some chefs asked Mr. Salvi to deliver in plain white boxes -- no label, no logo -- so they could pass off his pasta as their own homemade. No dice. Each box of Mr. Salvi's pasta bears a logo showing a hand gently lifting pasta strands and the word fede.

"In Italian, fede is the word for faith," he says. "There's a lot of meaning to me in that word. It is my belief in Christ, and the belief that He provides in business as well as in life.

"I feel blessed with the chefs that I have as clients and the people I have met."