Not Like Nonna

The Campanian tourist board must be at it again. After years of the region losing ground among well-heeled vacationers to Sicily and Puglia, suddenly a new iteration of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, the scammer toast of Amalfi, barrels onto Netflix, and now here comes Massara, a little slice of Campania in Manhattan, which makes its boundaries clear; it’s the rare ristorante that doesn’t stock a single bottle of Barolo. That’s northern stuff. “Food in 2024 has to be regional,” Stefano Secchi, Massara’s ponytailed chef, declaimed to the New York Times as the restaurant opened in June. Campania, in the southwest of the boot — it includes Naples, Amalfi, Capri, and Ischia — favors fish, fire, and Fiano.

In a tall, narrow, two-story space in the Flatiron District, Secchi and partner David Switzer, who also run the pasta-forward Rezdôra around the corner, have built themselves an ad hoc Italian farmhouse and run it like an inn in the uncanny valley. “Ciao!” the non-Italian host greeted me at the door; “Ciao!” the non-Italian bartender followed up at the bar. The bathroom plays its own soundtrack of introductory Italian lessons. “Dobbiamo andare — we’ve got to go!” This is, how you say, laying it on a little thick. It put me in mind, for a fleeting second, of Matt Damon, Ripley ’99, an American gone so pazzo for the charms of bella Italia that he soon he’s scolding his would-be countrymen for not knowing how good they have it, belting out the Neapolitan classic “Tu Vuò Fà l’Americano”: Why you wanna act American? (To translate loosely.) I had wondered to our waiter whether Secchi, with his Campanian zeal, was Campanian himself, which he first affirmed before coming back sheepishly with a correction: Campanian extraction but Dallas cultivation.

Whatever! Secchi has already proved himself an able interpreter of Italy’s pastas at Rezdôra, which has a similar regional bent, dedicated to the cuisine of Emilia-Romagna, in particular Modena. Massara brings that focus farther south with often excellent results. Secchi’s seafood-rich cavatelli allo scoglio (scogli are coastal rocks) is as good a pasta as I’ve had this year, studded with earring-size clams, fraying skeins of crabmeat, and, apparently, mussels and octopus, whose presence was less visible than palpable: just a breath of the sea. The pizzette, cooked in a roaring Acunto oven shipped over from Naples, is excellent too — the dough salty, charred, bubbled up two knuckles high, outshining its toppings (asparagus and black truffle, prosciutto and stracciatella). We made short work of three; so cautious is Secchi of turning Massara into a pizza restaurant, it seems, that his pies are almost punishingly small. Likewise the pastas, dished out in what a server euphemistically called “European portions” as he encouraged us to order more.

If the pastas all lived up to the standard of the cavatelli — or of a candele with a two-day braise of beef and onions — I’d happily take the paucity as proof of preciousness. But not all of them do. The patter is good at Massara — just wait for the epic tale of the 35-year-old sourdough starter, nurtured on ambient Campanian yeasts and passed down generationally — but the flavors can be spotty. A spaghettini with clams and Campanian olives sounds like an intriguing pairing and is one of only two pastas not made in-house but imported from Gragnano, where Italy’s best noodles are painstakingly dried. But it was almost inedibly salty. The restaurant’s signature dish, “If Pasta Fredda Was Eaten in Amalfi,” served cold in an oversweet tomato-and-almond sauce with raw shrimp and sea urchin, is a bold stroke but not one that found many fans at my table.

For abbondanza, there are more offerings among the main courses, though be prepared to pay for them. A grill-marked butterflied branzino of moderate size with a trio of sauces (dessertish zabaglione, herby salmoriglio, and irrelevant puttanesca) was $78. Slices of rare Wagyu are ominously “MP” — but at least they’ll go well with Aglianico, Campania’s native grape, which makes rich, earthy wines too brawny for almost anything else. I was intrigued on one visit by the promise of goat four ways for the table — roasted, cannellonied, etc. — but on my second visit, it had disappeared from the menu. “Sourcing issues,” our server apologized. Unlike in the Old Country, they were finding it hard to track down a goat.

The smallness — back in force by dessert, when a housemade sfogliatella showed up roughly the size of a mussel — inclines against the nonna’s-kitchen spirit of Massara and Rezdôra, names that refer to maternal figures in their respective local dialects. Fine-dining establishments have channeled matriarchs for ages; just look at the heyday of Lidia Bastianich or Pino Luongo’s ’80s hot spot Le Madri (“The Mothers”) before then. Some of these places took liberties too — not all of the chefs at Le Madri were actually Italian mothers. But you’d have to wonder what Nonna would say about these prices, these portions, to her wayward inheritors. One guess: Tu vuò fà l’americano?