The best pasta restaurants in New York City

On a lively block in Williamsburg, La Nonna Ristorante & Bar sets the tone with an easygoing, Italian-inflected atmosphere that feels just right for a slow dinner or a festive brunch. The warmth inside comes partly from the room itself — comfortable and unhurried — and partly from the story behind it. Owner Cono Morena was born and raised in Teggiano, a town in Campania, Italy, and moved to New York City in 1995, eventually channeling a passion for traditional Italian cooking into his own restaurant. The menu spans antipasti, seafood-forward entrées, and a lineup of house-made pastas that includes sacchetti al peperoncino and a mushroom pasta finished with an umami-rich cream sauce. Baked clams and arancini cacio e pepe round out a menu with real depth. Whole wheat and gluten-free pasta options are available throughout. For anyone looking for homemade pasta in Brooklyn with a southern Italian soul, La Nonna delivers without pretense.

Chefs Frank Castronovo and Frank Falcinelli — childhood friends from Queens who grew up eating at Italian grandmothers’ tables — reconnected in the early 2000s and set out to open the neighborhood restaurant they had always wanted: unpretentious, warm, and rooted in the Italian-American cooking of their childhoods. Frankies Spuntino opened in Carroll Gardens in 2004 and became an instant Brooklyn classic, with both chefs having trained across fine-dining kitchens in Europe and New York before stripping things back to the essentials. The tin-ceilinged, brick-walled room gives way to a beloved outdoor garden that has hosted some of the city’s most memorable meals. James Beard Foundation Award semifinalists for Outstanding Restaurateur, the duo put cavatelli with hot sausage and browned butter, meatballs with pine nuts and raisins, and tomato-sauced potato gnocchi on the map for a generation of New York diners. More than two decades in, the restaurant remains a benchmark for Italian restaurants in NYC.

The concept at San Marzano Pasta Fresca in the East Village is refreshingly direct: pick a pasta, pick a sauce, and let the kitchen do the rest. The mix-and-match approach gives diners real flexibility, with sauce options ranging from a robust wild boar ragù to broccoli rabe with sausage — a combination that speaks to the kind of everyday Italian cooking that has kept New York’s neighborhood pasta spots alive for generations. The room is casual and family-friendly, with a price-conscious spirit that makes it a reliable go-to in a neighborhood better known for its bars than its sit-down dining. For reservations, the restaurant operates a prix fixe format that includes family-style appetizers and a choice of main course, with wine, beer, and sangria available as part of the package. Fresh pasta in the East Village doesn’t get more straightforward — or more satisfying — than this.

From globally acclaimed chef Ignacio Mattos, Altro Paradiso has been one of SoHo’s most essential dining destinations since it opened in 2016, drawing a mix of neighborhood regulars and out-of-borough loyalists who treat it like a second home. The room does much of the work: 18-foot ceilings, a glimmering brass bar, marble floors, and white-oak accents create an atmosphere that manages to feel simultaneously lively and serene. A sunken dining room — three steps below ground, with a slender porthole into the kitchen — adds architectural intrigue, while a blue-striped awning extends over the sidewalk for al fresco dining. Chef de Cuisine Eze Unger leads a menu that draws inspiration from several Italian regions, celebrating the kind of timeless craftsmanship that has made the restaurant a lodestone for handmade pasta in NYC. The kitchen’s commitment to regional breadth and seasonal ingredients rewards the curious diner.

On the third floor of The Shops at Columbus Circle, Bad Roman is one of the more theatrical Italian restaurants in New York — and it knows it. Opened in 2023 by the Quality Branded restaurant group under the direction of Michael Stillman, the 250-seat dining room — serpentine salmon-pink banquettes, bubbly light fixtures, a half-ton stone wild boar at the entrance — announces its intentions immediately. Executive chef Nick Gaube and chef de cuisine Fernando Mayers take deliberate liberties with tradition: roasted garlic babka replaces bread service, rigatoni alla scarpariella shares the menu with pappardelle in short rib sauce, and a cacio e pepe ravioli crowns a filet mignon. Whole roasted lobster arrives with Calabrian campanelle for two, while the lemon cheesecake, shaped like lemons, is the kind of dessert that ends up on every table. For Italian-American pasta in a room built for celebration, Bad Roman delivers on its promise.

Anchored at the base of the iconic MetLife Building on Park Avenue, Giulietta channels the sun-drenched ease of the Mediterranean coastline into one of Midtown East’s most versatile dining rooms. The Capri-inspired setting — peach-toned walls, an expansive terrace, wicker-seated accents — feels like an escape hatch from the Midtown grind, just steps from Grand Central Terminal. From the La Pecora Bianca team, Giulietta operates as an all-day Italian restaurant, making it as practical for a weekday lunch as it is for a lively dinner with drinks. The pasta program, entirely housemade, spans garganelli with roasted wild mushrooms and arugula pesto, mezze maniche carbonara with farm egg and guanciale, linguine vongole, and a tagliatelle bolognese built on beef and pork. Gluten-free housemade pasta is available on request. The addition of burrata to any pasta or pizza is available as a customization, which is exactly the kind of touch that earns a restaurant repeat visitors in this neighborhood.

The vision of husband-and-wife co-founders Nick Anderer and Natalie Johnson, Anton’s opened in 2019 in a landmarked 1850s Greek-revival building in the West Village, and has operated as something close to the quintessential New York neighborhood restaurant ever since. Anderer, who built his reputation opening Italian restaurants for Union Square Hospitality Group, leans into European-inflected American cooking here — but his Italian training surfaces throughout the pasta program, listed on the menu under the charmingly old-fashioned heading “Macaroni.” The bucatini Baczynski — a riff on amatriciana made with thick-cut bacon from a Ukrainian butcher in the East Village — is the kind of dish that inspires standing reservations. Angel hair francese, spaghetti anchoiade, and lasagnettes in Anton’s ragù complete a pasta lineup that rewards the dedicated. Natalie Johnson oversees a 550-plus bottle wine list with more than 20 selections by the glass, making this as serious a wine bar as it is a pasta destination.

The name means “we’ve arrived” in Italian, and Ci Siamo — the live-fire Italian restaurant near Hudson Yards — makes a compelling case that the neighborhood has arrived, too. Chef Hillary Sterling, who draws from extensive travels across Italy, brings a precise, seasonal sensibility to a kitchen centered on open flames and housemade pasta. The restaurant, part of the Manhattan West development, occupies a room with floor-to-ceiling windows and views of the Empire State Building, along with a private bar and an adjacent outdoor terrace well-suited for private dining. Sterling’s cooking philosophy is rooted in simple, purposeful preparations: seasonal ingredients, live-fire technique, and pasta shaped in-house from scratch. A robust Italian wine list runs alongside the menu, which changes to reflect what’s available and what works over the flame. For fresh pasta in NYC with a focus on restraint and live-fire craft, Ci Siamo earns its place on this list.

Master pizzaiolo Salvatore Olivella was born into a family with a historic pizzeria in Italy, and that lineage is woven into everything at Forno D’Oro, his restaurant on 8th Avenue in Chelsea. Olivella works seven days a week, tasting every ingredient that comes through the kitchen and holding to the old-world traditions his father passed down — premium ingredients, no shortcuts, and a deep respect for the craft of Roman cooking. The menu bridges artisanal Roman-style pizza from specialized ovens and fresh house-made pasta, with ingredients sourced from Italian farms and local New York markets. Root vegetables, aromatic herbs, and classic sauces simmered to order define the kitchen’s identity. For those who want to go further, Forno D’Oro also offers hands-on pasta-making classes led by the culinary team, where participants learn to shape fresh pasta from scratch. It’s the kind of experience that underscores just how seriously this Chelsea kitchen takes its craft.

Gelso means mulberry in Italian, and the name is no accident — Gelso and Grand sits at the historic corner of Mulberry and Grand streets in Little Italy, occupying the former home of the Italian Food Center, a neighborhood fixture since 1954. Opened in 2015, the restaurant was designed as both a tribute to what Mulberry Street once was and a forward-looking take on what Italian dining in the neighborhood could become. Chef Cassidy Hallman, who came up in the kitchens of Bouley and Momofuku, mills the flour used in the pasta and pizza dough, a commitment to craft that runs through the entire operation. The menu includes hand-rolled pastas — among them a campanile alla vodka with basil and chili flakes and a spaghetti puttanesca — alongside wood-fired pizza. The rustic-modern room, with brick walls and high ceilings, opens onto outdoor seating on one of Little Italy’s most iconic stretches.

Near Rockefeller Center, Duomo51 draws on the Tuscan tradition with a setting that sets it apart from the surrounding midtown bustle. The restaurant’s terrace, which comes alive during warmer months, is designed to evoke the landscape of the Toscana region — dense greenery, the scent of fresh herbs, and modern architecture combined to create a pocket of Mediterranean calm with views of some of Manhattan’s most recognizable landmarks. The menu pairs Mediterranean cuisine with an extensive wine list sourced from around the world, and the kitchen works with premium ingredients to deliver a dining experience that earns its setting. Inside, the restaurant offers a quieter dining room suited to business lunches and evening dinners alike, with Italian hospitality anchoring both spaces. For a pasta meal in Midtown that feels genuinely removed from the pace of the streets below, Duomo51 offers a destination dining experience in a part of the city not always associated with it.

Tucked into a quiet block in Greenwich Village, Palma has been one of New York’s most distinctive organic Italian restaurants since it opened in April 2001 — the creation of Palma and her husband Pierre, who have kept the kitchen grounded in generations of family recipes ever since. The setting is immediately transportive: white stucco walls, beamed ceilings, a salvaged chestnut door, and a hidden garden filled with fresh flowers in every season. A 200-year-old carriage house at the rear serves as a private dining space of rare charm. The pasta program is one of the most carefully considered in the city: all fresh pastas are handmade using imported Italian flour, prepared using methods unchanged for centuries, from tortellini alla crema finished with 25-year aged balsamic from Modena, to fettuccine with roasted mushrooms and black truffle, to spaghetti all’astice with half a Maine lobster in a vesuvian vine tomato sauce. Produce arrives fresh daily from organic and biodynamic farms.

Opened in the year 2000 and now settled in TriBeCa, Max Restaurant is the kind of Italian restaurant that New York quietly depends on: consistent, deeply skilled, and built around the kind of pasta that keeps regulars coming back without fanfare. The kitchen’s soul-satisfying menu celebrates Italian flavors through time-honored techniques and fresh ingredients — slow-cooked sugo toscano ladled over homemade fettuccine, delicate porcini ravioli finished in truffled cream sauce, and fiocchetti filled with pear and taleggio are among the dishes that define what the restaurant does best. What started as a small place to eat in Alphabet City — before the restaurant moved to its current TriBeCa home — became one of the city’s most respected Italian kitchens, recognized for consistently turning out some of the best pasta in New York. The welcome is warm, the room is inviting, and the food tells a story with every bowl.