Zio Roberto opens in North Adams with handmade pasta room

The real signal at Zio Roberto Ristorante was downstairs, where a white basement pasta room was turning flour imported from Italy into tagliatelle, gnocchi and ravioli by hand. At 24-30 Marshall Street in North Adams, the new restaurant was being built around that hidden workhorse, with owner David Moresi and chefs Nick Moulton and Peter Belmonte treating fresh pasta as the center of the operation, not a side note.

That approach went well beyond a single signature dish. Moresi said everything was being done in house, including use of an extruder for some shapes, and the team was putting in a full half-day process to keep the pasta lineup fresh and consistent. The sourcing was part of the pitch too: imported flour was paired with local mushrooms from Delftree Mushroom Company and other fresh ingredients, giving the restaurant a mix of Italian technique and North Berkshire supply lines that felt deliberate rather than decorative.

Zio Roberto’s bigger ambition reached past the plate. Moresi framed the restaurant as a way to pull people out of Mass MoCA, up Marshall Street, around the corner and onto Main Street, where he wants them spending money at other businesses too. That matters in North Adams, where the museum draws more than 177,000 visitors a year and says those visitors spend an estimated $33.4 million annually at local businesses. The downtown connection has long been a challenge, complicated by the highway and bridge corridor between the museum area and the rest of downtown, and city and museum leaders have already pursued planning work aimed at closing that gap.

The project also carried family history. Moresi said his grandfather started the Mohawk Tavern in North Adams in 1933, and the restaurant is taking shape in the former Mohawk Tavern and Grazie space in the Mulcare Block, which Moresi bought in 2014. North Adams planners gave the go-ahead for the Italian restaurant in March 2026, and the city later approved an all-alcohol license for Zio Roberto Ristorante and Taverna, the companion lounge concept planned alongside the main dining room.

For North Adams, the basement pasta room was more than a kitchen detail. It was the clearest sign that Zio Roberto was trying to do what so many downtown projects promise and few manage: give people a reason to linger, walk, and spend time a little farther from the museum campus, with handmade pasta doing the heavy lifting.