New York’s foremost pasta master Stefano Secchi has thrown himself into a casual, new restaurant in the Flatiron District focused on simple, classic Italian fare. Secchi, who earned his Michelin star at Rezdôra around the corner, imagined the two-level, 600-square-metre expanse as a collection of intimate spaces with distinct flavours from the Campania region. He called it Massara and commissioned the Brooklyn hospitality specialists Sarah Carpenter & Studio to see through the design.

Carpenter’s team began with a three-storey atrium that draws essential natural light down to the four-metre-high main floor and its focal point: a pizza oven faced in rough natural stone and a five-metre Carrara marble counter. Down here, floors of irregular Italian travertine flagstone are complemented by deep-green tilework and pumpkin leather banquettes framed by fumed oak. Existing brick walls were plastered in several layers by Edmundson Studio. Vintage Murano pendants light the scene.

Elsewhere, the spaces are low-lit and atmospheric. The dusky stairwell opens onto a warm upper floor fashioned to feel like a friend’s home. The pea green accent colour is used more widely here, at the bar with its amber glass doors and in the so-called Green Room, a small dining room clad in green panelled walls and leather cushions. An open gelato-making station sits off to the side. Guests can gather around the wood and marble void at the centre of the upper storey and peer down to the pizza oven below.

Nods to the Campania region include brass and bronze light fixtures sourced from Italy, and vintage Italian paintings and books bought at auction and mounted on the walls.

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