And to be sure, if you watch Ms. Robbins and her kitchen crew at the end of one of two long dining counters, you’ll see the same quick motion over and over: an almost surreptitiously quick trip of hand to mouth, a sharp bite and an appraising chew to decide if that batch of pasta is ready to be pulled from the water. Some chefs show their mastery over pasta by pressing it thinner than a screen protector for an iPhone. Ms. Robbins likes hers to have body and heft, and the chew test is the most reliable way to tell when thick pasta like that is ready. You are very unlikely to get a piece that is undercooked at its core, or one that doesn’t fight back enough to let you know it is still alive.

You get this just-in-between texture in the stubs of mezze rigatoni with a simple, glossy, ripe tomato sauce that’s been stewed with whole garlic cloves — 30 to a batch, according to the menu. You get it again in the corzetti, discs about the diameter of a Red Bull can that are pressed with a wooden stamp to give them a target pattern. In October, Misi served these ridged coins with another tomato sauce, this one barely cooked, just some Sungold tomatoes warmed until they broke open and their yellow pulp spilled out. Fresh basil, thyme and chervil were scattered over the top, as good an illustration as any of how Ms. Robbins makes her food stand out without deviating from an Italian reliance on simple, unmanipulated ingredients.

But to call Misi a pasta restaurant would be to overlook its highly impressive work with vegetables. They are the subject of the menu’s other half, sneakily headlined “antipasti.”

This is where you will find a globe eggplant roasted until it is as soft and easy to spread as cream cheese; the cut surfaces are dressed with Calabrian chiles, and the taste of lemon juice seems to have found its way to the center of the eggplant. There are fleshy and firm chanterelles, too, lightly pickled and preserved in olive oil until they’re brought to the table crisscrossed with rosemary needles. Grilled runner beans with garlic and chiles have been around lately, too, in a big heap that I would have enjoyed more if a few stringy, leathery beans had not gotten past the inspectors in the kitchen.