Uovo is coming to New York. Eddie Sanchez
Uovo, a precision-focused Italian restaurant that makes pasta in Bologna and flies the hand-crafted noodles in a temperature-controlled compartment to the United States, will open in New York next year.
Uovo, which launched in Santa Monica in 2017 and now has five Los Angeles locations, plans to debut in New York in spring 2026, at 13 W. 28th St. in NoMad.
“We have a lot of Italian people who come to the restaurant,” Uovo co-founder Carlo Massimini tells Observer. “And we also have a lot of people from New York. Everybody always says, ‘Oh, you should go to New York.’ We think people will like us just as much in New York because we’re going to make exactly the same dishes.”
Uovo’s other co-founders are Carlo’s brother, Lele, and prolific restaurateur Jerry Greenberg. (Greenberg and Lele Massimini are also co-founders of Sugarfish and KazuNori, both of which have expanded from Los Angeles to New York.) They immersed themselves into creating a resolutely traditional Italian restaurant. One R&D trip that led to the birth of Uovo involved tasting 77 pastas in Rome, Bologna and a couple places just outside the northern Italian city, all in less than three days.
“That was the first time I ate with Carlo in this kind of a way,” Greenberg tells Observer. “By the time we got to the 75th pasta, I think Carlo was thinking about not joining us.”
The Massiminis and Greenberg clearly understand that New York is a city loaded with all kinds of hyper-specific Italian restaurants, including an outpost of born-in-Rome Roscioli and the Emilia Romagna-inspired Rezdôra.
“The culture of Italian food is so strong in New York, and that’s super appealing to us,” Greenberg tells Observer. “We want to go places that have a culture for the food. Some people think about going to a city because it’s underserved in their cuisine, but that’s not how we think about it.”
The pasta is made with time-honored sheeting and cutting techniques. Flavia Lucidi
The original plan for Uovo was to ship over Italian eggs with rich red yolks that are optimal for pasta. Once the team realized this wasn’t possible, they put together a Bologna kitchen and tapped chef Pino Mastrangelo and pasta-maker Stefania Randi to run it. None of the noodles at Uovo are extruded. Everything is made with time-honored sheeting and cutting techniques. And the combination of this process and the eggs Uovo uses results in strikingly yellow noodles that bind well with sauce.
Both Mastrangelo and Randi came to Uovo from Bologna’s Antica Trattoria della Gigina, a restaurant so generous in spirit that it also shared its born-in-the-1950s Bolognese recipe with Uovo.
Uovo makes its ragu using Bologna restaurant Gigina’s recipe. Dominick Aznavour
Carlo is still gobsmacked about how he went to Gigina as a normal guest and got invited to return the next day and learn how to make pasta in the kitchen. Now, Uovo makes its ragu using Gigina’s recipe. But instead of beef from Italy, Uovo gets 100 percent grass-fed wagyu from New Zealand’s First Light Farms. Greenberg, who also runs wagyu-centric restaurants HiHo Cheeseburger, Matu and Matū Kai, traveled the world in search of the best beef and believes that First Light is the champion.
Sorting out a vongole recipe at Uovo was more complicated than learning the Bolognese recipe. The Massiminis were born and raised in Rome, and Uovo figured out how to re-create their mother’s clam sauce. The challenge was that Carlo and Lele’s mom is a home cook who makes vongole intuitively.
The vongole recipe was a touch more complicated to learn than the Bolognese. Eddie Sanchez
“We drove my mom crazy because we need to measure it, we need to check it,” Carlo says. “My mom does everything with her eyes.”
For amatriciana, Uovo was inspired by the thick, crispy squares of guanciale that Roscioli uses in Rome.
“We did a tremendous amount of very high-heat testing,” Greenberg says. “It was about how you apply the heat so that it’s crisp on the outside but still has a bit of life on the inside.”
It’s this commitment to precision that led Uovo to source tomatoes grown in Basilicata and 24-month-aged Parmigiano-Reggiano from Parma. Uovo even makes its limited gluten-free pasta options in Bologna.
The amatriciana. Eddie Sanchez
Uovo is light on starters and side dishes, and there are no main courses that come after pasta. Substitutions are not allowed. The focus here is traditional pasta through and through.
Adding to the precision: Every order at Uovo is prepared individually.
“We need to be consistent,” Carlo says. “We believe we have strong traditional recipes, and we want the food to be exactly as we expect it.”
“There’s plenty of Italian food that exists in New York,” Greenberg says. “There’s New York Italian, red sauce Italian, Italian Italian, probably all kinds of fusion Italian. We think that the specific super-traditional Italian at Uovo will fit in great and add to the mix in New York.”
There’s one big detail that Uovo is working out as it prepares to open in New York. An important part of the process is having pasta rest while it’s in transit. Because flights to New York are shorter than they are to L.A., Uovo is looking at how and when to add resting time for its pasta. Rest assured, the Massiminis and Greenberg won’t be satisfied until they get this exactly right.
Dining and Cooking