Lilia

The Restaurant

Lilia occupies a whitewashed renovated 1920s auto-body shop at 567 Union Avenue in North Williamsburg, on the corner of North 10th Street a few blocks from the East River waterfront. The room - vaulted ceilings, white tile, terra-cotta floor, a long wood-fired open kitchen visible from every table - was designed by Robbins's longtime collaborator Sean Knibb and has become one of the most-photographed restaurant rooms in the country. Chef-owner Missy Robbins - previously the executive chef of A Voce Madison and A Voce Columbus, where she earned consecutive Michelin stars - opened Lilia in 2016 to immediate three-star New York Times acclaim, and the room has not slowed in the years since. Robbins's cookbook Pasta is widely cited as one of the defining American restaurant cookbooks of the last decade.

The pasta programme is the room's argument and the reason most tables come. The mafaldine with pink peppercorns, parmesan, and a small splash of cream is the signature - a deceptively simple plate that has become one of the most-copied pasta preparations of the last ten years. The agnolotti del plin with saffron and dissolved butter is the room's most technical preparation. The rigatoni with spicy lamb sausage and tomato is the steady comfort order. The kitchen makes every pasta in-house each day in a glass-walled pasta room visible from the main dining floor, and the discipline of the preparation reads on the plate every time. Wood-fired seafood handles the secondi - the grilled clams with chili and oregano, the wood-fired branzino for two - and a precise vegetable programme rotates with the Northeastern season.

The wine list is almost entirely Italian and runs about three hundred references with depth in Sicily (Etna whites, Nero d'Avola), Piedmont (Barolo and Barbaresco from small estates), and a strong by-the-glass programme that rotates through fifteen pours per evening. The cocktail bar runs a serious aperitivo programme - Campari, Aperol, Cynar, Cocchi vermouth flights, a Negroni-and-spritz list - and the after-dinner amaro pours are unusually thoughtful. The service is famously warm and unpretentious - the floor team has been with Robbins for years and the captain-to-table register is closer to a neighbourhood Italian than the room's three-star pedigree suggests. The reservation system opens exactly thirty days ahead at 10am ET; the prime weekend slots are gone in under a minute, so set a phone alert and refresh through the moment.