La Devozione: The Oval

Over a Century at the Table: The Di Martino Legacy in New York

La Devozione: The Oval is a modern Italian pasta tasting restaurant in New York City, with a price tier of $$$$ and a $125-per-person average, at 428 W 16th St, New York, NY 10011. Pastificio Di Martino, the Campanian family operation behind La Devozione: The Oval, has been making pasta since 1912. That 110-plus year record is not incidental to what happens at the 30-seat counter inside Chelsea Market, it is the entire premise. Across Italy, a small number of historic pastifici have survived successive generations of industrial competition by doubling down on craft and specificity. Di Martino is one of them, and The Oval is how that lineage arrives in New York City.

Generational kitchen traditions operate differently from chef-driven restaurants. Where the latter often pivot around a single personality or tenure, family-run food production companies accumulate institutional knowledge: which durum wheat performs leading at which hydration, how regional sauce traditions change the demands on a shape, which techniques hold across time and which need revision. That accumulated knowledge is what The Oval is designed to transmit. Compare this model to other Italian-American dining landmarks like Babbo or Via Carota, where the editorial frame is the chef's creative vision. At The Oval, the frame is older and less personal: a family archive of pasta knowledge that predates most American restaurants by decades.

The Counter Format: Pasta as a Tasting Discipline

Counter dining in New York has expanded significantly across cuisines, from Japanese omakase to contemporary tasting formats at places like Ai Fiori and Altro Paradiso. What The Oval does with that format is singular in its category: an all-pasta progression, plate after plate, with no interruption from other proteins or courses designed to reset the palate. This is a commitment. Thirty seats face the kitchen in an oval configuration that gives the format its name, and the sequencing of the menu functions the way a tasting menu does elsewhere, building through shapes, sauces, and textural registers, except that pasta is never a supporting role. It is always the subject.

The dishes documented from The Oval's menu illustrate how that single-subject discipline works in practice. Manicotti arrives filled with sole and dressed with butter and capers, a combination that demands a pasta precise enough not to collapse under the acidity while still absorbing the richness of the butter. Penne with rabbit confit and artichokes positions the shape as a structural element rather than a neutral carrier. The meal closes with a granita and grapefruit foam in a Mojito-inflected dessert that functions as a palate reset within the pasta-forward logic of the evening rather than a departure from it. These are not dishes designed for individual acclaim. They are designed to cohere as a sequence.

At the $$$$ price tier, The Oval sits alongside tasting-format restaurants across New York that include Michelin-starred rooms and venues drawing international comparison. The comparable set here is less the trattorias of the West Village and more the counter formats where the progression itself is the product. For Italian dining in New York, this is an unusual positioning: no steaks, no shareable plates, no à la carte optionality.

Chelsea Market and the Broader West Side Context

Chelsea Market is one of the more layered food-retail environments in New York. Opened in 1997 in the former Nabisco factory building on West 15th and 16th Streets, it has housed everything from wholesale food operations to high-traffic visitor dining. La Devozione occupies a position within the market that includes both a pasta retail shop and the two dining formats, of which The Oval is the more structured and reservation-oriented. This dual-mode operation, retail alongside counter dining, mirrors how the Di Martino family has always operated: production and consumption as connected rather than separate acts.

The West Chelsea neighbourhood has consolidated around gallery culture and the High Line visitor corridor, which brings a cosmopolitan but variable dining public to the area. For focused counter dining in this part of the city, options at the $$$$ level are fewer than in Midtown or the lower West Village. Compared to the Ammazzacaffè end of the neighbourhood's Italian dining, The Oval targets a different occasion: deliberate, sequence-driven, unhurried.

Italian Tasting Counters in a Global Frame

The format of a counter pasta tasting sits within a broader international conversation about how Italian culinary tradition gets transmitted at a premium level. In Hong Kong, 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo Bombana has built a three-Michelin-star case for Italian fine dining outside Italy. In Kyoto, cenci does something different again, filtering Italian technique through Japanese ingredient sensibility. What Di Martino does at The Oval is closer to a third model: not creative reimagining, but rigorous transmission, taking a family production legacy and presenting it in a counter format with tasting-menu discipline.

For a sense of how this counter-tasting model compares to other American formats where the meal is the product, Lazy Bear in San Francisco, Alinea in Chicago, and Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg each demonstrate how a fixed-format counter progression can command a $$$$ price point when the concept is coherent and the execution is consistent. The Oval occupies its own position within that territory: narrower in its focus, older in its institutional backing, and more specific about its subject matter than most of those rooms.

Planning a Visit

La Devozione: The Oval is located at 428 West 16th Street within Chelsea Market, accessible from multiple subway lines serving the West 14th Street and Eighth Avenue stations. The 30-seat oval counter format means availability is limited, and the structured tasting-menu progression is not suited to spontaneous drop-ins. Advance booking is advisable, particularly for weekend evenings when Chelsea Market's wider visitor traffic competes with the dining reservation window. The price point sits at $$$$, or about $125 per person.

For those travelling with Italian food as a specific interest and looking for comparison points beyond New York, Emeril's in New Orleans, Providence in Los Angeles, and The French Laundry in Napa each illustrate how American fine dining institutions have built authority around lineage and consistency over time, the same terms on which The Oval ultimately stakes its claim.