Misi Is Much More Than a Pasta Restaurant

Almost everybody is calling Misi, the latest endeavor from the chef Missy Robbins, a pasta restaurant. That’s not quite right.

Yes, Ms. Robbins has given half of her menu over to long noodles and short ones; strands of linguine with chopped garlic and a double dose of fish in the form of chopped anchovies and drizzled colatura; circles filled with ricotta whipped until it is as soft as cream; pinched rings of tortelli stuffed with mascarpone and spinach; the deeply ridged Sardinian shells known as malloreddus; and other Italian marvels of starch formation.

True, anybody who has been to Ms. Robbins’s other restaurant, Lilia, also located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, knows that the pasta there reliably steals the show from everything else on the table. When those people show up at Misi, odds are good that they will not have chosen that day to start a keto diet.

Moreover, Misi has a greater variety of pasta than Lilia, so many that the architecture makes space for them. Misi is across the street from the old Domino refinery on the East River, where the cranes used to unload sugar from barges in the open air so that on days when the wind was right you could taste it on your tongue a mile away. Next to the dining room, facing the factory’s remains, is a separate, glassed-in workshop where the temperature and humidity are kept at consistent dough-friendly levels. There, the long noodles, etc., are rolled out and cut long before 5:30 each night, when Misi’s front door is unlocked and the crowd waiting in line for walk-in seats begins to snake eagerly forward.

And to be sure, if you watch Ms. Robbins and her kitchen crew at the end of one of two long dining counters, you’ll see the same quick motion over and over: an almost surreptitiously quick trip of hand to mouth, a sharp bite and an appraising chew to decide if that batch of pasta is ready to be pulled from the water. Some chefs show their mastery over pasta by pressing it thinner than a screen protector for an iPhone. Ms. Robbins likes hers to have body and heft, and the chew test is the most reliable way to tell when thick pasta like that is ready. You are very unlikely to get a piece that is undercooked at its core, or one that doesn’t fight back enough to let you know it is still alive.