La Devozione: The Oval – pasta as devotion in Chelsea Market

In the brick-vaulted heart of Chelsea Market, La Devozione: The Oval turns a pasta shop into a stage for fine dining. The 30-seat, open-kitchen counter is the centrepiece of La Devozione, the first American outpost of Pastificio Di Martino, the Gragnano family firm that has pressed pasta through bronze dies since 1912. Here the devotion in the name becomes literal: chefs plate each course within arm's reach of the diners seated around the oval counter, course after course built from Di Martino's PGI Gragnano pasta in its many shapes. The Oval is selected in the MICHELIN Guide, recognition for a kitchen that treats pasta not as a side element but as the entire architecture of a meal, from amuse-bouche to dessert. It sits a few steps from the market's pasta shop and its more casual dining room, A Tavola, making La Devozione one of Chelsea's few addresses where you can buy the noodle, watch it made, and eat it tasting-menu style, all under one roof.

01The room and the setting

The restaurant occupies roughly 4,000 square feet of Chelsea Market, designed by architect Marcello Panza of Studio Minimo; La Devozione, a new pasta shop and Italian restaurant has opened inside Chelsea Market, and after stepping into the space, you may think you're in Southern Italy. The Oval itself is a 30-seat, open-kitchen counter built around state-of-the-art stovetops and pasta stations, where diners watch each dish finished a few feet away.

Beyond the counter, the same roof holds a retail pasta shop stocked with more than 120 shapes of Di Martino's bronze-die Gragnano pasta, hand-painted ceramics and plateware from Vietri's Solimene Ceramica, and limited-edition tins made in collaboration with Dolce&Gabbana and Barbie. A to-go counter faces the market's main concourse for diners who want their spaghetti on the move rather than at the counter.

02The chef

The tasting menu's architecture comes from Peppe Guida, the force behind the Michelin-starred Antica Osteria Nonna Rosa in Campania, whose philosophy of restraint, memory, and ingredient-first cooking has earned international reverence. His recipes are reinterpreted night to night by the chef running the New York kitchen.

Insider tip

Selected in the MICHELIN Guide. Tasting menu $195; wine pairing $115. Open daily; reservations via Resy.

That chef is Alessio Rossetti, an Italian chef who has been working in some of the finest restaurants in New York City for more than 10 years. As executive chef he writes the seasonal tasting menus served at The Oval and, on occasion, the vegetarian pasta specials the restaurant has built for events like the Plant Based World Expo at the Javits Center.

03The cooking

Everything here starts from a single conviction: that pasta shape dictates technique. The kitchen pushes that logic hard on the tasting menu, where the chefs simmer it, dehydrate it, grind it, and turn it into pasta chips, and cook their pasta in a lemon leaf infusion rather than salted water. The pasta itself comes from Gragnano, the Campania town whose PGI-protected dough is still extruded through bronze dies and dried slowly at low temperature, giving it the rough, sauce-catching surface the kitchen builds entire dishes around.

The current tasting menu, Tra Mare e Fuoco (Between Sea and Fire), moves region by region through the south of Italy over six courses and a dessert: a stuffed zucchini flower to start, Adriatic shellfish linguettine for Abruzzo, paccheri with bergamot and swordfish for Calabria, canneroni lisci with potatoes, mussels and bottarga for Puglia, fusilli lunghi col buco alla Norma for Sicily, and an Ischian-style rabbit mezzani for Campania, before the restaurant's own signature dish and a rum babà to close.

04What to order

The à la carte room beyond the counter, A Tavola, keeps things closer to the orthodox. The menu's own namesake, La Devozione — spaghetti, tomato and fresh basil — is a dish that, as the restaurant tells it, was dubbed “the devotion” by Giuseppe Di Martino and the late Gambero Rosso founder and food critic Stefano Bonilli, after a trip the two took through Italy together.

Elsewhere on the à la carte menu: vermicelli cacio e pepe shaved with black summer truffle, mezzi rigatoni alla carbonara with guanciale and egg yolk, bucatini Wagyu alla pizzaiola, and linguettine with sea urchin, cherry tomatoes and chives. For dessert, a pasta-built tiramisù called Pastamisù sits alongside Sicilian cannoli and a chocolate caprese.

05Wine and drinks

The tasting menu comes with an optional wine pairing, pitched toward Italian producers alongside natural and biodynamic picks, at an additional cost on top of the tasting menu price. The bar runs its own register of Italian-leaning cocktails — Baptism by Fire (rosemary gin, limoncello, lemon), a Porcini Sour built on porcini-and-cacao-infused bourbon, and a short run of spritz built from Aperol, Select or Campari — plus the classic aperitivo staples diners expect from a room devoted to pasta and little else.

06The neighbourhood

Chelsea Market remains one of the few places in Manhattan where a destination tasting-menu counter sits a few steps from a food-hall crowd and a pasta retail shop. The restaurant leans into that: its to-go counter serves the signature spaghetti al pomodoro in take-away containers so guests can carry it out for a stroll through the market or up onto the High Line, which runs directly above the building.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.