How Do You Follow a Hit Like Rezdôra?

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If you’ve ever tried and failed to get a reservation at Rezdôra, the 60-seat Flatiron room that specializes in intricate, prosciutto-filled pastas from Modena, help is on the way. Around the corner, on Broadway, chef Stefano Secchi and partner David Switzer are opening Massara — a cavernous, two-story restaurant dedicated to the cooking traditions of Campania and all of its fire, smoke, and fish.

Secchi describes the 105-seat space as a sort of “contemporary farmhouse in New York City.” The restaurant centers around an open kitchen that features an Acunto pizza oven from Naples, set into a wall of glossy dark-teal tile — a notable upgrade from the Unox combi oven at Rezdôra. It also features a custom-built wood-burning grill, which will be used for steaks, contorni like zucchini and eggplant, and to blister reverse-butterflied branzino.

“In the beginning at Rezdôra, the idea was to have a wood-burning grill,” Secchi says. “We couldn’t afford it.” One Michelin star and a few hyperbolic reviews later, they apparently can now — Tony Shalhoub is among the investors — and Secchi has the chance to celebrate the grilled fish he grew up eating while visiting Campania with his family as a kid.

The chef also wanted Massara to be a restaurant where he could use the pizza starter that’s been in his family for 35 years. “We’ve always been practicing over the past two years to try to do something really delicious with it,” he tells me. This has culminated in a menu of dainty, saucer-size “pizzettes” and a two-hour pizza-tasting menu.

Yes, there will be pasta, too, but don’t get your hopes up about tortellini, pici, or agnolotti. “We would never put agnolotti on there because that’s a pasta from Piedmont,” Secchi explains. “Even though agnolotti is, like, one of the most satisfying pastas ever.” Instead, Massara will serve dishes like the Cheesemakers Raviolini, which are filled with smoked buffalo mozzarella and layered with passatas from two types of tomato.

At Rezdôra, Secchi says, people were always asking why there wasn’t more tomato sauce on the menu: “Why is it always prosciutto and mortadella? And what about more seafood?” Those diners had clearly not spent much time in Emilia-Romagna, the farm- and pasture-heavy region to which Rezdôra’s menu was dedicated. Now, those same diners will find all the datterini, San Marzanos, langoustines, and scallops they could hope for.

There’s also a subsection of the menu dedicated to pastas imported from Gragnano, a municipality known for its 48-hour, low-heat pasta-drying technique. In a city that’s quickly filling up with “coastal Italian” restaurants, Massara may be the only one gutsy enough to serve a $32 cold pasta with red shrimp (the dish’s official name is If Pasta Fredda Was Eaten in Amalfi).

Like the agnolotti, Secchi and Switzer are drawing a line in the sand (or the volcanic soil, to be geologically precise) about only serving wines from southern regions like Sardinia and Sicily. “We don’t allow Champagne inside, which would give us massive check averages, right?” says Switzer, who finds the regional limitation to be among the most exciting parts of opening Massara. Switzer sees a lot of New York restaurants highlighting the “hits” of Italy, while the stricter regional approach means identifying some of the “deep tracks” of Campania.

More than anything, Switzer and Secchi seem relieved to be opening a bigger restaurant. In the first eight months of Rezdôra being open, René Redzepi reached out about coming to dine with a group of 12 people — but the largest table in the restaurant only fits five. “One of the greatest chefs in the world, right?” Secchi recalls. “And we could only ever fit five people, tops, in a party.”

If Rezdôra, a room full of two-tops, is one of Flatiron’s favorite date spots, Massara has the potential to become one of the neighborhood’s expense-account destinations. With multiple dining rooms and two bars spread out across two stories, it’s big enough to section off spaces for private parties without interrupting dinner service in the rest of the restaurant. The best view into the pizza oven is from an eight-person table that juts out from the open kitchen.

More space means more customers and flexibility, but it also opens the door for more ambitious food. Soon, for $50 per person, a table full of diners will be able to pre-order a goat prepared four different ways: braised, roasted, grilled, and in cannelloni. “We never had the space in Rezdôra to do something like that,” says Secchi, who’s still researching a consistent whole-goat supplier and thinking about ways to use each part. But in the meantime, he’s happy to imagine his guests’ conversations the morning after: “The next day you’ll be like, ‘Oh man, we went to Massara last night and we did the goat dinner, and it was epic.’”

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Anna Hezel , 2024-06-12 16:25:30

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