Massara
A late dinner at the much-hyped follow up to much-hyped Rezdora.
Note: in my reviews labeled “Recent Bites,” I will be writing about meals I had in recent weeks or months. I have a backlog of restaurant experiences to share!
Massara, the new restaurant from the Rezdora team — which shares some DNA with Massimo Bottura’s famous Osteria Francescana (said to be one of the best Italian restaurants in the world—it’s on my bucket list!) — is among the most sought-after tables in NYC right now. So when I got a Resy alert for a 10 pm table on a Saturday, I jumped at the chance. Massara focuses on dishes from Campagnia rather than Rezdora’s Emilia-Romagna. As a pasta lover, I was extremely excited about visiting a restaurant with small pasta portions where I knew I’d be able to taste multiple dishes. Unfortunately, the meal fell short of expectations — and of the gratuitous hype surrounding it.
Our meal began with a caprese salad, also one of my death row dishes. I expected July tomatoes from a star chef to blow me away, but these were forgettable despite being a pretty mix of fiery hues. The bufala mozzarella, too, was good but not great. This caprese was not worthy of a Michelin-starred chef.
The best thing we ate was probably a pizzette, or small pizza topped with cold prosciutto, arugula, and bufala mozzarella. Much has been made of the pizza oven that the chef imported straight from Italy for use at Massara, and indeed, the crust was near-perfect. Still, this isn’t the best Napoleon pizza in New York by any stretch of the imagination.
The pastas, which should have been the star of the meal, were equally disappointing. Each one is about four bites—and we were told as much—but priced like a full-sized pasta dish. The server recommended three or four, so that’s what we did. We tried the candele genovese, the pasta mista, the cheesemaker’s raviolini, and the paccheri pomodoro. The first three were tasty but nothing to write home about. The raviolini was filled with burrata, which excited us, but it turned out to be indistinguishable from ricotta; since it was topped with tomato sauce, the result was a comforting but very basic pasta dish. The genovese was equally forgettable, though the meat was at least tender. The pasta mista was the dish I was most excited about; it was, at least, fun and different given the mixed shapes, but the sauce (also tomato-based) didn’t have much flavor besides a vague smokiness from scamorza cheese. The paccheri pomodoro, which I had seen touted online as Massara’s best pasta, not only had a sauce that tasted like Campbell’s tomato soup but was so al dente it was almost crunchy. I would not order any of these pastas again.
To tell the truth, I should have expected as much, given that I was somewhat disappointed in Rezdora as well when I visited over two years ago. The Michelin-starred spot is known for its pasta tasting menu — which, again, is pretty much my dream meal — but I found the dishes to be uneven. (The Meatpacking district’s Al Coro, which earned two Michelin stars in its first year and then bafflingly shuttered by the end of its second, quietly boasted a five course pasta tasting that blew Rezdora’s out of the water and ended up being my favorite meal of 2023. It is one of the restaurant world’s greatest injustices that Rezdora remains while Al Coro is no more.)
Skip Massara and make your favorite pasta dish at home. You’ll save a hundred-plus dollars and end up happier for it.
TL;DR: WHAT WE ATE
Loved: nothing
Liked: crudo pizzette, pasta mixta, cheesemakers’ raviolini, candele genovese, caprese salad
Could have skipped: paccheri pomodoro