NEW YORK is full of men and women who have gone to extreme lengths to make a perfect plate of pasta. But it’s possible that no one has gone quite so far as Massimo Galeano.

Step into his restaurant, Gradisca, on West 13th Street, and on many nights you will find a 65-year-old woman standing beside a table that is dusted with flour. There, wearing a white bonnet and greeting customers with a vigorous “buona sera,” Caterina Schenardi will spend much of the evening stuffing impeccably minced meat into pouches of pasta, then folding and pinching the pouches into tortellini that come out light enough to charm a table of carb-dodging dieters and small enough to serve as tricorner hats for an army of toy soldiers.

“Very tiny,” Mr. Galeano said on a recent Wednesday night as he watched her in action. “Small. Delicate.” The size and shape of the tortellini should be comparable, he said, to “that famous part in the painting by Botticelli” — the navel, that is, of the goddess in “The Birth of Venus.”

And when Mr. Galeano says that this elfin, ethereal version of tortellini is what “I grew up with,” he means just that.