Lilia

This large, renovated garage space on the scissoring intersection of Union Avenue and North 10th Street in Williamsburg is the popular home of Missy Robbins, who began her career in Chicago, where she found fame as “Obama’s favorite pasta chef,” before taking over the kitchen, to great acclaim, at the now defunct, haute Italian restaurant A Voce in midtown. Compared to those grandiose operations, this restaurant has a modest, utilitarian feel (the bar area is bustling during the afterwork hours, and the café operation during the day sells pastries and excellent panini stuffed with ribbons of prosciutto or burrata cheese). The menu isn’t as ambitious as back in the Robbins heyday, but it’s difficult to argue with the talented chef’s restrained small-plates dishes, like puffy, golden fritters flavored in the manner of the Roman pasta dish cacio e pepe, tangles of perfectly al dente spaghetti tossed with lemon, chiles, and toasted bread crumbs, and the justly famous house agnolotti, which Robbins and her small army of pasta cooks fill with warm deposits of sheeps’ milk cheese faintly sweetened with honey.