Jupiter – pasta and piazza spirit beside the Rockefeller rink

On the Rink Level of Rockefeller Center, tables face the ice beneath 20 West 50th Street, where Jupiter has turned one of Manhattan's most watched addresses into a regional Italian dining room. It is the second restaurant from Clare de Boer, Annie Shi and Jess Shadbolt, the team behind King in Soho, and it opened in the autumn of 2022 with handmade pastas, New Italian wines, seasonal vegetables and grilled meats at its centre. The room borrows the piazza instinct of Rome, Florence and Milan rather than the hush of a formal dining room, and the kitchen's commitment to fresh pasta, done at a scale King's small kitchen never allowed, is the clearest sign of what the move uptown was for. Jupiter is listed as a selection in the MICHELIN Guide, recognition for a kitchen that treats Rockefeller Center's enormous foot traffic as an opportunity rather than a compromise.

01The room and the setting

Jupiter sits within the Rockefeller Center concourse renovated between 2020 and 2022, a project that reshaped the spaces ringing the skating rink and gave the restaurant pride of place in the new layout. The dining rooms, designed by Workstead with G3 Architecture as executive architect, seat 150 across two rooms and span roughly 4,000 square feet, a scale King's cult-favourite West Village original never had room for.

The palette was built around a warm white limewashed interior, with a honed red travertine bar and open kitchen running the perimeter, lined with 1970s chrome Jerry Johnson bar stools. A rounded, stepped ceiling encircling the bar nods to the Art Deco language of Rockefeller Center itself, while a glossy yellow-tiled column and deep blue pillars divide the dining spaces, and three arched niches near the bar are fitted with orange mohair banquettes under eclipse-shaped lighting.

The brief, from chefs who trained together in London, asked designers to reference the Richard Rogers-designed River Café on the Thames, with the bold, confident use of colour in Luca Guadagnino's films and interiors as a further touchstone.

02The chefs

Clare de Boer, Jess Shadbolt and Annie Shi built their reputation at King, which opened in Soho in 2016 and has run on a daily-changing menu determined each morning by its staff. De Boer has been nominated for the James Beard Rising Star Chef award, and she, Shadbolt and Shi opened Jupiter as a second act in 2022, this time built specifically around the pasta they had never had the scale to cook in quantity at King.

Insider tip

Open Monday–Saturday, 11:30am–10pm; corkage $35 per bottle (two-bottle max).

At Jupiter's opening, the kitchen was led day to day by executive chef Gaz Herbert, previously of London's River Café, reinforcing the thread that runs from the trio's own training back to the restaurant that shaped their cooking.

03The cooking

The menu reads as regional Italian rather than invented-Italian: a short run of starters, salads and sandwiches, a long pasta list, grilled mains, contorni and a tight dessert card, printed in full on Jupiter's own site. Starters include fritto misto of shrimp, calamari and zucchini with herby crème fraîche, bruschetta topped with whipped ricotta and chanterelle mushrooms, and burrata dressed simply with fennel fronds and Pianogrillo extra virgin olive oil.

Pasta is the spine of the operation, handmade and offered in a wider range than King's kitchen ever allowed: rigatoni carbonara with guanciale and black pepper, pappardelle with an eight-hour beef ragù, tortelloni filled with delica pumpkin in sage and brown butter, and tagliarini finished with mascarpone, Meyer lemon and black pepper sit alongside grilled halibut, swordfish with caponata and pinoli, and a hanger steak served with Yukon gold potatoes and horseradish cream.

04What to order

From the pasta list, the rigatoni carbonara and the pappardelle with eight-hour beef ragù are the dishes built for Jupiter's open kitchen and larger pasta programme, while the tortelloni with delica pumpkin suits the autumn months. Among starters, the burrata with Pianogrillo olive oil and the arancini of fried risotto with melted fontina are straightforward opening moves.

To finish, the menu lists The 30 Rock Cake alongside tiramisu, affogato made with gelato and espresso, and a torta all'olio d'oliva served with ricotta sorbet, plus a short list of gelato and sorbet flavours including fior di latte and moka coffee.

05Wine and drinks

Annie Shi, co-owner and beverage director, built the wine programme around a new generation of Italian winemakers who are reviving near-extinct grape varieties and reclaiming family vineyards, assembling an all-Italian by-the-glass list alongside a 400-bottle list skewed toward these producers. The bar takes its cues from Italian aperitivo culture, built on Italian liqueurs, and every cocktail can be made zero-proof, with spirits addable to the low-alcohol options as well.

Jupiter's own corkage policy, published on its menu, charges $35 per bottle with a two-bottle maximum from Tuesday to Sunday, while Monday evenings carry free corkage on up to two bottles.

06The neighbourhood

Jupiter sits on the Rink Level of Rockefeller Center, reachable from the street via the 50th Street elevator, with a dining room that looks directly onto the ice rink and the plaza's seasonal rhythms, from summer dining to the Christmas tree. The address puts it within a few minutes' walk of Fifth Avenue, St Patrick's Cathedral and the Broadway theatre district, which makes it a natural stop for a pre-theatre pasta or a post-curtain glass of something Italian, as the restaurant's own description of itself as suited to pre-theatre dinners and after-work vino suggests.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.