Hanging from Via Carota’s ceiling, menacing a large farmhouse table that had been surrounded by smiling customers just a few minutes earlier, was a row of long iron spikes, bent into hooks at their ends. They’d been retrofitted with light bulbs to make a functional if terrifying chandelier, but what was their original purpose? Several possibilities suggested themselves, from medieval torture device to a particularly inhumane way of catching fish.  “You’ll have to ask Jody,” a server said after admitting that she didn’t really know what the thing was either. “Every day, she brings in something else that she’s just found. She’ll say, ‘Don’t think about it, but that olive bowl is 200 years old.’ ”  Jody is the chef Jody Williams. She shares responsibility for Via Carota’s Italian menu with the chef Rita Sodi, her partner in both business and domestic matters. When it comes, however, to buying antique nail barrels, china hutches, silver teapots, seltzer siphons, porcelain creamers, glazed cheese crocks, woven wood baskets, woven metal baskets and other stuff to fill a restaurant, Ms. Williams does it all by herself.  Her eye for dressing a room is well known by the many people who swear by Ms. Williams’s other restaurant, Buvette, a hop and a skip to the west on Grove Street. Buvette is filled with antiques and flea-market triumphs, starting with the black Raleigh bicycle left unchained on the sidewalk, as if the owner had just popped in for a croque-monsieur on the way to buy an armful of leeks. Buvette is French, and its premise seems to be that everything about France and the French is deeply adorable. The tables, the plates, even the silverware are about two sizes smaller than normal. Many people, some of whom live in Paris, where a second Buvette is a big hit, find all this irresistible. But it always makes me feel as if I’m on the set of a Wes Anderson film wearing a large trash bag while everybody else is dressed in vintage Boy Scout uniforms.  Fortunately, while Via Carota has been energetically propped, it avoids the preciousness of Buvette. There is an ambient cuteness level, to be sure, but it is balanced by an Italian severity; the spiky iron chandelier (made by the sculptor Warren Muller from a clam rake) hanging over the charming cocktail coupes. The beechwood chairs with built-in pockets for books, for instance, came from a chapel in Wales. They make you sit up straight.  Best of all, Ms. Williams and Ms. Sodi are cooking deeply appealing food, without mugging.  Ms. Sodi is a stickler about classic Italian pasta, which forms the foundation of her own small restaurant nearby, I Sodi. You can tell she is a stickler because her pastas taste the way they are supposed to taste, the sauces not too complicated or heavily applied, the noodles not too tight and not too flabby.  I might have liked a little more wildness in the wild-boar ragù over pappardelle, but I could not have asked for a more rounded, balanced, mellow ragù or more supple noodles. And while pasta with black truffles may not sound modest, there was nothing ostentatious about the irregular patches of pasta called stracci (it means “rags”) turned with melted butter, Parmigiano-Reggiano and truffle shavings; it seemed, in fact, like the only sensible thing to do with a truffle.  Apart from calling it a svizzerina and topping it with rosemary and whole garlic cloves, they make no attempt to prettify the chopped New York strip steak. Molded into a puck and seared on cast iron, it is both simple and amazing. Those of us who believe that the best burgers are chopped with knives, as this one is, will especially love the way the svizzerina feels in the mouth, substantial and even slightly luxurious, a quality that steak loses the minute it goes through a meat grinder.  Like most of the meat and fish dishes, the bunless, French-fry-less svizzerina stands more or less alone, Italian style. Under the very simple and very good rabbit, patiently pan-fried, you will get a slice of fried bread to take care of any oil. If you like the taste of rabbit, this is the dish for you. A stub of grilled octopus leg gets a mound of green-olive relish.  If all this pasta and protein sends you looking for vegetables, you will find yourself in one of Via Carota’s strongholds. There are vegetables of all shapes and sizes, and with them the chefs give up a bit of their severity and start to play. Twiglike salsify roots were caramelized in brown butter, almost candied, and wonderful. A fennel bulb, cooked until tender, was dressed in orange pulp and orange zest. Shafts of leeks, poached and served cool, were topped with shavings of cured mullet roe and grated hard-cooked eggs; suddenly, I did not want to see leeks served any other way. Only with the grilled radicchio did they go over the top, piling on sweetness with currants and balsamic vinegar, then enriching everything with soft caprino cheese.  But that kind of excess is just what Via Carota typically and gracefully avoids. Creamy stracchino cheese may seem too rich to stand in for fresh mozzarella on crostini with cherry tomatoes, especially tomatoes that have been sun-dried to a raisin-like sweetness. As things turn out, it’s phenomenal. So is the mash of walnuts, honey and lardo that the chefs spread on another crostino, one that would be just as good at breakfast or dessert, or with cheese or yogurt. It would probably be good sold from a vending machine at the Port Authority.  But then you would miss the short and no-nonsense list of drinks made from as few ingredients as possible (Italian-style, again). Or the much longer but still no-nonsense wine list, which covers a lot of ground without letting the prices get too out of hand. (Do keep an eye on the bottom line, though. It’s surprisingly easy to reach $100 a person if you decide to taste something from each category on the menu.) Or the very tender crostata with a thin, sticky layer of raspberry jam.  Most of all, you’d miss the chance to see the West Village take to this restaurant as if it had been around as long as one of Ms. Williams’s olive bowls.  What the stars mean Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction primarily to food, with ambience, service and price taken into consideration.  51 Grove Street (Seventh Avenue), West Village; viacarota.com  ATMOSPHERE Behind a wall of windows, the relaxed, rustic dining room is relatively large and tightly packed.  SERVICE Good once they’ve noticed you.  RECOMMENDED Vegetables; all pasta; fried rabbit; fricassee of sweetbreads and artichokes; grilled octopus; chopped steak; raspberry crostata.  DRINKS AND WINE Aperitifs are Italian style; cocktails are classic. Wine list is all-Italian except for Champagne, with many affordable bottles.  PRICES Appetizers and vegetables, $8 to $16; pastas and main courses, $17 to $25.  WHEELCHAIR ACCESS The dining room is on sidewalk level; restrooms are not accessible.  Email: petewells@nytimes.com. And follow Pete Wells on Twitter: @pete_wells.  A version of this review appears in print on March 4, 2015, on page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Kitchen Built for Two. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The chefs Jody Williams and Rita Sodi, partners in business and domestic affairs, are the owners and chefs of Via Carota in Greenwich Village.