Missy Robbins’s Lowest Key Pasta Paradiso

If you can’t get into Lilia, you might end up at Misi, Robbins’s lower-key spot on the other end of Williamsburg. When I close my eyes at Misi, I have a great time; the pastas are terrific, and the vegetable dishes are zingy and bright. But I’ve always struggled with the room, which is glass-walled and ceramic-floored. Its planes of gray and black feel hard-edged and sterile, which is to say entirely at odds with the emotional warmth of the food coming out of the kitchen. So I feel a bit like Goldilocks at Robbins’s newest spot, Misipasta, which opened last summer, again in Williamsburg, on the ground floor of a charming brick row house on an especially charming stretch of Grand Street. It’s a market as much as a restaurant, and the narrow room is mostly given over to operational space, including an airy pasta-making area in the front and an efficient galley kitchen in the back. The walls are lined with shelves of groceries; there’s a refrigerator case stocked with jars of pasta sauce and fresh cheeses and bundles of cut herbs. A glass counter shows off trays of fresh pastas by the pound and other prepared foods. There is also a brief and focussed eat-in menu of, more or less, exactly what a tired and hungry person wants to eat.