You will wait. Probably for hours. The line at Via Carota on Grove Street has become as much a part of the restaurant's identity as the food itself, a peculiar badge of honor for a place that has somehow maintained its grip on the city's dining consciousness without leaning on hype or pretension. Since 2014, when Williams and Sodi opened their 40-seat space, the restaurant has refused to bend to the modern machinery of reservation systems and Instagram promotion. Walk-ins rule. Lucky reservations are rare. And yet, the salmon swimming upstream returns anyway.
There's a reason. The food at Via Carota is relentlessly, almost stubbornly good—unfussy Italian cooking that respects its ingredients more than it respects trends. A cacio e pepe arrives stripped down to its essential components: pasta, pecorino, black pepper, and the kind of restraint that feels revolutionary in a city obsessed with maximalism. The tonnarelli has the weight and pull of proper Rome cooking. Grilled artichokes taste like artichokes, charred at the edges and finished with something that makes you understand why Italians bothered to cultivate them in the first place. The svizzerina—a chopped steak that shouldn't work but does—sits on the plate like an argument for simplicity itself.
What Williams and Sodi have built is less a restaurant than a perfect distillation of what neighborhood dining should feel like: crowded, alive, ungovernable by reservation software. The kitchen moves at its own pace. The wine list knows what it's doing without announcing it. And somehow, impossibly, the insalata verde tastes like it was meant for you specifically, on that exact night, after you've waited long enough to actually want it.
Via Carota has attracted everyone from Taylor Swift to anyone with a functioning palate and the patience to wait. It's become a restaurant person's restaurant precisely because it refuses to perform that role. The dining room doesn't acknowledge the celebrities; it doesn't need to. The only thing that matters here is whether the pasta is good. It always is.
Ten years in, Via Carota remains what it's always been: the table that defines the West Village, the one you'll return to the way that salmon returns upstream, because the current demands it.