One of the most fundamental tools of Italian cooking is the chitarra, or “guitar,” a long board strung with sharp wires used to create handmade pastas. Fabio Trabocchi, of Fiamma, has had his since he started culinary school; he bought it in Teramo, in Abruzzi, and has used it for his entire career. “It’s really like a guitar,” he says. “You have to keep the strings stretched, with the tension just right. But if you use it right, you get pasta that has a certain porosity that you could never get from a pasta machine. That makes it absorb the sauce better and gives it a rustic kind of flavor.” Trabocchi uses the chitarra most frequently on Fiamma’s carbonara, but he’s used it for hundreds of pastas over his career. “It’s from my home region,” he tells us. “I’ll always use it.”

Commerce isn’t the first restaurant you would expect to spend almost $100,000 on a world-class custom oven, but chef Harold Moore says “it’s good for the chef’s ego.” He’s only half-joking: “We need serious cooks here, and they don’t get much money, so we need some serious equipment. It gives us an edge in getting them and keeping them.”

The $35,000 Labesse Giraudon rotisserie at Country is an immense rotating gas spit, channeling powerful heat and turning its edible cargo on an axis powered by churning gears and chains. Manufactured by Les Ateliers, the mechanism allows for vertical or horizontal turning. And though it looks straight out of the nineteenth century, chef de cuisine Willis Loughhead assures us the rotisserie is entirely modern: “Artificial filaments amplify the heat from the gas flames, and the curvature of the internal hood channels the heat around to the other side, so that whatever you are cooking gets radiant heat on two sides.” Loughhead, using the rotisserie’s variety of cages and hooks, cooks everything from whole baby lambs to the most delicate baby chickens in there, and wants to start cooking even more. “I want to do an all-rotisserie meal,” Loughhead says. “Whole rabbits, lobsters, prime rib. There’s so much this thing can do.”

In most restaurants, crème brûlée is a year-round dessert, but that's not the case with Savoy. The crème brûlée branding iron is heated in the fireplace. That's right: a crème brûlée branding iron. Savoy is defiantly old-school, and refuses to use a butane torch to brown the surface of its custard. Says owner Peter Hoffman, “It adds a nice ‘fireplace flavor’ to the dessert — a subtle taste of wood and smoke that’s infused into the sugar. With a butane torch, you can definitely caramelize the sugar; but you can’t get that fireplace flavor.” There's even a pleasant side effect to the iron's use: A sweet, marshmallowy aroma briefly wafts across the room, no doubt inspiring other diners to order the same thing. Get your branded brûlée this weekend and next. After that, the fireplace goes cold for the season.

Related: Annotated Dish: Savoy’s Cassoulet

If the PacoJet is the ice-cream machine of the dessert avant-garde, then the old-fashioned, massive, nearly unbreakable Coldelite ice-cream maker is the 1972 Cadillac to the PacoJet’s 2008 Prius. At the very old-school Seymour Burton, chef Josh Shuffman inherited the machine from the restaurant’s former owner, Sammy Kader. “We could never have bought one like this,” he says. “I don’t even know how they got it into the basement.” The Coldelite produces four ice creams a night: caramel, bourbon chocolate, vanilla, and a changing special — usually blueberry or rum raisin. Like everything else at Seymour Burton, the ice creams couldn’t be any simpler or less challenging, or any better. Not that Shuffman will take credit for it. “It’s all the machine. I’m out of my depth! I’m not a dessert chef. But the best you can do as a chef is to find something that works and stick to it.”

Related: If It's a Frozen Dessert at P*ong, Blame the Pacojet

It’s a tricky business to make chung fun, or rice noodles. They're sticky and dense, and the dough is typically thicker than most Chinese noodle dough. Steaming it is problematic, but the ever-inventive Joe Ng at Chinatown Brasserie has come up with a streamlined solution: a customized dough cooker that’s a cross between a crêpe pan, a steamer, and a colander. “It works exactly like a steamer, except it’s flat,” says Ng. “We lay some very thin fabric in over the holes, and the dough is cooked very fast, like in 30 seconds. It takes up less space than an ordinary noodle cooker, and we change the fabric constantly.” For a machine that takes up so little space, it's very efficient, he says. “I designed it myself and gave it to the manufacturer to make. No one else has one like it.” As for how well it works, the only solution is to eat the rice noodles at Chinatown Brasserie and judge for yourself.

There’s a lot at San Domenico to attract the eye, like the Italian aristocrats or the celebrities periodically perched at table nine (Johnny Depp and Keith Richards ate there the other night). But the most striking thing in the restaurant remains the immense antique Berkel proscuitto slicer, a gift from Friuli to owner Tony May after September 11. “It’s the Ferrari of slicing machines,” May says. “It’s a simple machine, but it’s a jewel. It was a great gift.” Built in 1941 and powered by hand, it has a razor-sharp slicing edge that turns with the measured pace of a roulette wheel on its final spins.

In the wonderful world of pasta, there is the fresh (usually made with eggs and rolled-out), and there is the dried (usually eggless and extruded). And then there is the unusual hybrid of sorts that Marco Canora has recently introduced on his Insieme menu. While surfing the Web, as all blog-obsessed chefs are wont to do, Canora discovered an old Venetian–style hand-cranked pasta extruder known as the Bigolaro, a.k.a. the Torchio, and if he had his doubts about its decidedly low-tech looks, the price, at $280, was right. The rustic gadget, which was patented in 1875, clamps on to any sturdy tabletop, and although it requires the strength of two Greco–Roman wrestlers to operate, the results are worth the effort.

Jean Georges isn’t a restaurant known for its attachment to experimental cuisine; if anything, J-G Vongerichten’s highly formal flagship is considered a bastion of old-school tablecloth dining. But Vongerichten has always been in the gastronomic vanguard, and he and chef de cuisine Mark Lapico are among the city’s most ardent admirers of the CVap oven, a controlled-humidity technology they use so much that there's three of them in the kitchen.

“If the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted,” Jesus asks in Matthew’s Gospel, and we have to agree: Spices need to bring it in the kitchen, or they shouldn’t be used at all. So when New York’s top chefs want to max out their flavor, they usually turn to the mysterious individual named Mr. Recipe, a one-man spice emporium who supplies the city’s chefs with enormous vanilla beans from Sulawesi and Madagascar, Tellicherry extra-extra-bold black pepper, Ugandan mace, and more. “I've learned a lot from him,” says Mark Ladner of Del Posto. Mr. Recipe handles over a hundred spices, but he started out in the vanilla business, and that’s still his calling card: “He procures the very best vanilla beans, extremely intense. He also has a wonderful ground vanilla bean that is perfect for gelato,” says Alto’s Michael White. (Sam Mason of Tailor is also a huge fan.)