The setting at Nonna Dora’s — the pasta restaurant that opened on Church and Duane in September — can throw you off the scent, so if you instead picture exposed brick, tile floors and cafe tables, you’ll get a better sense of the culinary experience. This was, of course, the longtime home of the diner Tribeca’s Kitchen before it was converted to an upscale Greek restaurant. The diner vibe persists, but that’s not really what’s going on here.

Nonna Dora is in fact the woman above — Addolorata Marzovilla, 87 — who has been cooking her entire life, of course, but opened her first restaurant serving handmade pasta in Kips Bay in 2022. Dora immigrated here in the 1970s at the age of 34 and she first worked as a seamstress but when her son, Nicola, opened a restaurant as an adult, she started making pasta for him.

“I like making pasta” Ms. Marzovilla told The New York Times when Nonna Dora’s opened, adding that she also liked being around people.

Dora is often in the window — the pasta lab as they call it — and that’s where I caught her when I went in for lunch last fall (yes, yes, it’s been that long). And Nicola is on the floor. Dora and her team of four women make 150 pounds of pasta a day for the two restaurants — and for years, they worked out of the basement of Nicola’s restaurant.

“In 2017 we did some renovations and we brought her upstairs, out of the basement,” Nicola said. “Around the same time I got a call from a woman in London who focused on Italian grandmothers. She filmed a Sunday dinner at my mom’s house in Murray Hill. That went viral. She exploded on social media. Till then we never really featured her. We didn’t really feel comfortable hawking my mother. But she loved it.”

Nicola sold the restaurant he had for nearly 30 years, I Trulli, in 2021 and focused instead on wineries he has in Tuscany. But Dora wasn’t ready to retire — she hated being cooped up during covid — and she wanted to keep “her girls” together. So they opened Nonna Dora’s and once The Times covered it, they had to expand.

They took the space here because it has a huge back of house area that allows them to make all the pasta, foccacias and sauces for both restaurants. Plus they liked the mezzanine for private events (it accommodates up to 40 with its own bar and restroom).

The menu is pastas of course, but also very fish forward. The family is from Puglia, where they eat fish raw right out of the Adriatic. And in fact just about every product and every recipe can be traced back to the homeland. The cherry tomatoes that come in jars of salted water are sourced from a coop of 13 women in Puglia — “throw them in a pan and go.”

These are not diner prices, so don’t let that fool you. The pappardelle in wild boar ragú is $36, spaghetti and meatballs is $34. Gluten free options are available for an added $4.

We did the classic pasta tasting — $78 — and it was just about as much as you could eat and very very special: broccoli rabe and ricotta dumplings; fine egg pasta with duck confit, peas and pea shoots; orecchiette in rabbit ragú — the recipe that Nicola’s grandmother made every Sunday. “She would make the pasta but never eat with us,” he remembers — her picture is on the wall. “She’d go home and leave it to us.”

Nonna Dora’s
200 Church at Duane
212-389-6022
Monday through Thursday – lunch from noon until 3p, dinner at 5p, last seating 9:30p
Friday – Lunch from noon until 3PM, dinner at 5PM, last seating 10p
Saturday – Noon until last seating at 10p
Sunday – Noon until last seating at 9p