How Lilia chef Missy Robbins is reimagining the restaurant model

On an unusually heat autumn afternoon, Sean Feeney and Missy Robbins sit within the again backyard of their newest enterprise, Misipasta, a pasta store and restaurant in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Robbins, 52, is the soft-spoken, bespectacled James Beard Award-winning chef who gained accolades for her virtuosic facility with Italian delicacies. She is bookish and prefers utilitarian onesies. Feeney, 42, then again, is an excitable Bruce Springsteen-loving former funding banker who favors beanies and streetwear. Earlier than he partnered with Robbins, Feeney had by no means labored in a restaurant, however, he says, “I’m knowledgeable diner. My complete life, the one factor I’m snug doing goes out and consuming.”

Their first restaurant, Lilia, opened in 2016 and occupies a former storage within the neighborhood of Greenpoint. As quickly because it opened, its sheep’s milk cheese-filled agnolotti grew to become a useful foreign money among the many metropolis’s consuming public. Tables had been arduous to attain, particularly after the restaurant gained three stars from The New York Instances. The follow-up restaurant, Misi, opened in 2018 in a brand new development on the bustling Kent Avenue, with an much more acute give attention to pasta. In a pristine street-facing pasta room, a pastaio made sheets and sheets of contemporary pasta, like a carbohydrate Walter White. It, too, was awarded three stars from The New York Instances, and it, too, had strains snaking from the door. 

Two eating places in three years looks like a glacial tempo. However the deliberate pace is the embodiment of Robbins’s and Feeney’s strategy. “We’re very totally different,” admits Robbins, “Sean pushes me to go somewhat quicker. I push him to go somewhat slower. We’ve type of met at this place.” 

Misipasta, solely their third enterprise, is terra nuovo for them each. “I can now not say, ‘Sean, I’ve been doing this for 30 years. You’re fallacious,’ and he can now not say, ‘You’re an previous canine, and I want to show you new methods,’” says Robbins, “We’re studying collectively.” Feeney jumps in to make clear, “She has stated that about me. I’ve not stated that about her.” 

Positioned on a aspect avenue across the nook from Misi, the newly opened retailer has neat shows of olive oil and tinned fish, a purring espresso machine behind the bar, and a deli case filled with freshly made tangles of tagliatelle, ribbons of lasagna, and nests of spaghetti. The again half of the house is break up between an aperitivo-style bar with a restricted menu and punctiliously curated cabinets of staples. Prospects can order pastas, sauces, cheeses, and even meatballs and porchetta for pickup and supply (as much as 5 days out), permitting them to assemble a meal at dwelling. The shop additionally ships staples nationwide, provisioning the far corners of the nation with freshly made pasta due to the miracle of next-day air. 

“The restaurant business needs to be reimagined,” explains Feeney. “The times of eating places the place there are solely two income streams—meals and alcohol—simply doesn’t work anymore.” One well-trodden resolution is to maneuver into the world of client packaged items. Examples abound. Marguerite Zabar Mariscal, CEO of Momofuku, estimates that by the tip of the yr, income from that company’s CPG business will equal whole income from its eating places. (This was shortly earlier than the group introduced it was closing two of its most well-known places in New York.) Different eating places, like Tacombi and Una Pizza Napoletana, have launched CPG manufacturers within the perception that the arithmetic of scale and quantity make reaching shoppers in, say, the Entire Meals aisle vastly extra worthwhile than making an attempt to lure them right into a restaurant.

However Misipasta isn’t that, not precisely. Visions of cabinets throughout America aren’t precisely what dance in Robbins’s head. Except one sauce—a easy tomato sauce—nothing at Misipasta is shelf-stable, which is important for large sallies into the retail aisle. Feeney and Robbins are banking on intimacy, or not less than the feeling of intimacy, over scale. Not like different CPG manufacturers, they search to construct a complete way of life round what is actually flour, eggs, and water. Misipasta, as they see it, is a “Gesamtkunstwerk,” which incorporates not simply the pastas, sauces, and condiments—produced domestically however shipped nationally—however sometime even video directions delivered by Robbins. 

“Ideally,” says Feeney, “you’d be cooking with Missy on the display screen subsequent to you, providing you with directions. There are methods for us to be with you in your journey.” As for Robbins, she says, “I’d like to create a line of dishes and glassware, and it’s actually arduous to search out the stuff that’s good. How cool would it not be to only be capable of design it your self?”

Feeney and Robbins aren’t trying towards the meals world for inspiration as they develop the enterprise. They’re considering a lot greater than that. “Ralph Lauren made one tie that was somewhat thicker than others offered again within the day,” explains Feeney. “He put that tie right into a backpack and ran round New York Metropolis” till he was capable of finding a purchaser, and ultimately construct an empire. “We take into consideration our hospitality model in that means. It simply begins with a quite simple pasta.”