Food & Drink

Chowing down at Stella 34, inside Macy’s Herald Square

Except for Koreatown and Keens, the West 30s are a restaurant wasteland. Italian’s scarce, and when you stumble on the odd grim trattoria left over from the old Garment District, you wish you hadn’t.

So, new Stella 34 on Macy’s sixth floor is a sparkling amenity not only for the great department store, but for the culinarily barren blocks around it. You don’t have to shop till you drop: All it takes is an appetite for pasta, pizza, garlic and olive oil.

You don’t need to navigate the bustling main floor to get there, either: Express elevators inside the entrance at Broadway and 35th Street whisk you to the sixth floor. The 11,500-square-foot eatery (all white except for colorful celeb caricatures), with its views through bay windows of Herald Square and the Empire State Building and an endless, serpentine marble bar, momentarily make you forget it’s Macy’s.

But not if you face the mid-room area that flows into the selling floor: The bare tile floor wants furniture, a planter or something to say it’s not an extension of sheets and pillowcases.

Stella 34 — part of Macy’s impressive top-to-bottom modernization — is run by Patina Restaurant Group, which operates classy venues Lincoln, The Sea Grill and The Brasserie. Young chef Jarett Appell has a firm hand on the throttle of the big, open kitchen anchored by Neapolitan-style, wood-burning ovens.

The floor crew’s almost too cheerful. “Fantastic choice,” raved one fellow upon my decision to have semolina sesame bread rather than sourdough. You forgive their enthusiasm for their patience walking foreign customers, who speak every known language, through the menu.

The modern-mainstream Italian lineup breaks no new ground, nor should it. Off-notes — tough baby octopus (no excuse for it in an age of tenderized cephalopods) and forgettable rotisserie chicken — are more than made up for by artfully composed salads ($9 to $13 small portions, $14 to $18 large) and pasta ($17 to $22).

Salads are as texturally engaging as they are pretty. Standouts include fragrant “barbabietole” of beets, lentils, arugula, stracciatella and candied pistachio, and “di verdura,” a spry composition of warm, multicolor cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, golden raisins and pignoli nuts in light red-wine vinaigrette.

Among pasta, perfectly square chitarra holds rich San Marzano tomato sauce. I wish it were easy to get simple-seeming linguini with white clam sauce as good as this elsewhere: It’s amplified by flavors of garlic and anchovies and lightened just enough by lemon juice.

Appell indulges a few departures like platessa ($27) — flounder filet atop fine-shaved Brussels sprouts, deepened with rich-flavored speck and pignoli nuts. There are more traditionally Italian meat and fish dishes as well.

But customers seem to order more pizzas than anything else. Never a white-pie fan, I prefer “classics” made with prized San Marzano tomatoes and “water meticulously sourced from local wells to match the pH and mineral balance of the natural spring water in Naples.”

Crusts bear their toppings well — I flipped for Barese with tomato, sausage, broccoli rabe and smoked mozzarella — although they could be more distinct, with more crisp for contrast.

There are accessible wine, beer and cocktail lists as well as grappa and liqueurs. Among them is Fernet Branca, which is mercifully not made into an ice-cream sandwich as it notoriously was in some trendy place downtown.

In fact, desserts ($8) are terrific. Our loyalties were with silly-good house-made gelato and delicate sheep’s milk ricotta cheesecake flanked by an orange-on-orange trio of marmellata, gelato and red-tinted slices of cara cara.

Stella 34 is that rare department-store find where I can dine without a thought of shopping. Retail therapy? For me, a full stomach beats an empty wallet every time.